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Home - Theater
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Venus, Meet the Caveman
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Defending the Caveman is primal fun at the Playhouse
by David Williams
Never before has a prop so begged for greater explanation than the one in the Omaha Community Playhouse presentation of Defending the Caveman, the touring production of the longest-running solo show in Broadway history.
Art history geeks and anthropology nerds will have to wait until later in this review for more on the zaftig, earthenware figurine in question while the rest of us spend the next few drops of ink looking at a work that takes a thoroughly tired and overdone theme — the battle of the sexes — and gives it a whole new, more meaningful spin in a hilarious exploration of a world divided, the caveman tells us, between “women and assholes.”
That would be us, guys. We may be un-evolved, knuckle-dragging, slack-jawed mirror images of our cave-dwelling ancestors, but there is also plenty of fun poked at whoever will be sitting next to you at this one. It’s the sort of night where both of you will have ample opportunity for wags of the finger, knowing nods and elbow jabs following some of the evening’s most humorously insightful moments.
And there are many.
Reminding men that we are the first generation whose lives may be totally different than those of our fathers’ when it comes to increasingly malleable gender roles, Defending the Caveman will have you reassessing the “why” behind things you probably never even gave much thought to before.
Reading on the toilet, dodgeball, the Zen of fishing, territorial rights to the remote control, the party game of Scruples (“a fight in a box,” we’re told) and even your prized “thingy” — an appendage that some women consider a “birth defect” — all are laid bare in a nature vs. nurture foray into who we are and what we do.
Written and originally performed by Rob Becker, he now has a half-dozen cavemen roaming the country’s stages. I saw Isaac Lamb in the preview performance last week, but Paul Perroni will take over the remainder of the run. If his antics are anything like Lamb’s perfectly timed, rubber-faced shenanigans, Perroni will be a big hit in the small, intimate space of the Howard Drew Theatre.
Minimal though effective staging finds Flintstones-style furnishings backed by a pair of yin vs. yang, hunter vs. gatherer, male vs. female cave paintings.
And that takes us back to the prop that deserves further examination.
Sure, it is recognizable as a prehistoric fertility goddess, but what neither the program nor the caveman tells us is that this is more than an amalgam or imagined piece.
It is none other than a replica of the famed Venus of Willendorf.
Discovered in 1908 near the village of Willendorf, Austria, the Venus is estimated to be about 25,000 years old, making it among the earliest known representations of the human form.
But what makes it unique is that it wasn’t unique. Disparate groups across the globe — tribal peoples who couldn’t possibly have intermingled — created a Venus equivalent of their own, eerily identical statuettes that over-stressed the feminine at the expense of realism.
The Venus, like her many sisters in clay, has facial features, arms and feet that are obscured to the point of nothingness in a work that instead wildly exaggerates such childbearing assets as breasts, the abdomen and genitals.
Is it possible that early humans were actually hardwired to be drawn to a certain ideal of womanhood? Is it possible that our system of cranial cravings is equally hardwired today, even if we are advanced enough to have mastered programming a VCR, and now even a DVR?
Just when I thought that Defending the Caveman was little more than a particularly effective one-man stand-up treatment of what is otherwise a decidedly overworked topic, I am drawn to the show’s deeper, universal themes.
Like the Venus of Willendorf, Defending the Caveman speaks to that nebulous balance between the everywhere and the nowhere, the cosmic and the terrestrial, the primal and the poetic — those things that make us truly human, truly man and woman — all wrapped around a couple hours of nonstop laughter.
Defending the Caveman runs through Aug. 1 at the Omaha Community Playhouse, 6915 Cass St., Wed.-Fri. at 8 p.m., Sat. at 5 p.m. and 8 p.m. and Sun. at 3 p.m. Tickets are $35. Call 553.0800 or visit omahaplayhouse.com.
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