In the Company of Creeps in East Hampton
Gabe McKinley’s drama “Extinction” — running now through April 16 at Guild Hall — sits firmly in the “Men Behaving Badly” genre. Fans of Neil LaBute and of David Rabe’s “Hurlyburly” will feel right at home in this tale of two friends who meet in a seedy Atlantic City hotel room with the expectation of reviving their wild past.
They are, to a certain extent, successful. The proceedings in this hotel room grow increasingly lurid, until by the end the audience has been put through a ringer of decadence and male self-pity. Not to mention a mother lode of cynicism.
Generally these dramas go something like this: A playwright isolates a group of randy guys (here just two) in order to eavesdrop on what men are “really like” behind closed doors. Drinks are poured, drugs are ingested, women are talked about. The salty dialogue wallows in sexual bravado that may be ugly but nevertheless has a comic zing. Finally the women arrive, throwing the dysfunction into overdrive. By the end there are fisticuffs, ugly confessions, and drunken tears. Bad boys, it seems, are really just lonely inside.
There’s a good deal of this sort of thing in “Extinction.” Max and Finn are old friends who shared decadent times in Manhattan. Names of their past female conquests roll off their tongues like song titles, and they even have a point-scoring process for their successes: “Single women three points, married women five points.” Max, who hasn’t seen Finn in quite a while, is looking for a similar crazy time at the casino. His mother has just died, and he’s ready to bury the pain of her memory in a wave of drugs, booze, and sex.
Finn, however, seems reluctant, and it’s soon revealed that he has gotten married and has a baby on the way. He also seems to renounce his past and its excesses, explaining to Max that he has “evolved.” Why he has decided to come to Atlantic City to see Max (especially when Finn purposely didn’t invite his old friend to his wedding) is a bit of a mystery. One explanation might be that Finn is short of funds for graduate school, and he may have intended to ask Max for a loan. We never find out because Max offers first, though he withholds the money as a kind of ransom: Party with me this weekend or else.
As played by Eric Svendsen, Max is a typical young professional on the prowl, ready to devour everything in his path, and Mr. Svendsen finds the wicked charm of the urban wild man. His manic energy is exhausting to watch — for 90-plus minutes he flails, bellows, and bashes around the hotel room, pausing only to light a cigarette or snort a line. There is no doubt this is an actor working his tail off, though one may wonder why the director, Josh Gladstone, didn’t ask for more progression to Max’s mania.
By the end of the play, as the drug and alcohol intake begins to pile up, Mr. Svendsen has nowhere left on the dial to go; he’s been at 11 from the opening bell. The only place he can go is down, though his crash at the play’s denouement is indeed effective.
Sawyer Spielberg finds the quiet vulnerability in Finn, though it’s not always easy to believe that Finn is a former ladies’ man gone straight. This may be a fault of the text more than the actor, since Mr. McKinley makes Finn so articulate in his defense of fidelity and his disgust at Max’s misogyny. Complicating things is that Mr. Spielberg’s mild-mannered decency is so convincing it’s hard to locate any residual miles on him from his road to excess. This doesn’t hurt our sympathy for Finn, however, and near the finale, when Max reveals to him a past betrayal, the actor makes the character’s pain feel real.
Brynne Kraynak as Missy and Raye Levine as Victoria bring a desperate humanity to a pair of reluctant prostitutes who visit the men in their hotel suite. These sultry vixens have sad backstories that add a new level of tragedy to an already bleak drama. And if the play’s memorable final scene is dramatically manipulative, but also genuinely disturbing, it is in good part due to these two actresses.
But my oh my, what a work of pessimism this is. In the drama’s early stages we hear Max deliver his philosophy of extinction, which I paraphrase here: Men must fight and screw in order for the continuation of the species, thus men are hot-wired for bad behavior. “Extinction” ultimately rejects this notion, but its worldview may be even more cynical. By the end it strips nearly everything from its characters; every illusion is burned to the ground.
The real extinction in this drama is the author’s faith in humanity.
Engage with it at your peril.