Portland Phoenix | Ever Seen a Cockfight?: DRC's fabulous play will claw at your heart

Two men, lovers, are sparring in a hexagonal ring: advance and retreat, circle and feint, posture and jab. The more nattily dressed one (Ian Carlsen), fueled by hurt and outrage, is on the offensive, while the other, John (Andrew Sawyer), paces and scrambles his defense. In a show called Cock (the cockfight play), by Mike Bartlett, John and his boyfriend are cocks, and they are also fighting about cock — about, namely, whether John, after an infidelity, still prefers it to the alternative. Originally slated for Dramatic Repertory Company’s 2015 season, before artistic director Keith Powell Beyland’s stroke delayed production, DRC’s sharp-witted and mesmerizingly executed Cock finally hits the stage, featuring the original 2015 cast and co-directed by Beyland and Tess Van Horn.

In this show whose dialogue is often barbed, truncated, repetitive, and/or profane — and whose script calls for no set, props, or miming — the relationships of bodies in space and time is paramount. And under the remarkably dynamic direction of Van Horn and Beyland, the actors’ movement on stage is hypnotic. In the lovers’ opening bout, John’s boyfriend (who is unnamed) approaches, looms, turns imperiously away, gestures in elegant indignation, as John paces frantically, defensively bobs his head, puts himself in a corner. One minute, Carlsen paces around Sawyer on his knees, and, the next, takes center himself, arms crossed, eyes wide with ire. Then, suddenly, volume and pace drop precipitously, and they are in each other’s arms and lips, all histrionics melted away. But once John kneels at his boyfriend’s feet — face at crotch level, all velvety seduction — his lover lunges, pins him backward on the floor. The excellent Sawyer and Carlsen deftly and acutely physicalize these shifts in power and feeling, as Carlsen moves between humiliated high sarcasm to plain, undisguised need; Sawyer from helpless confusion to skillful manipulation and back.