There are two kinds of people in the world – those who, given a paddle to signal willingness for audience participation at a play set in a strip club, will raise it high, and then there’s me. The crowd arrived hyped for Dave Harris’s Tender – my neighbour waved her paddle through the pre-show playlist – but it’s not really about rambunctious bump and grind. Instead, Harris delves into modern masculinity: hard bodies, squishy hearts.
The Dancing Bears is a down at heel club in New Jersey. Two young dudes and a non-dancing daddy work their teddy-bear heads and neon-green jocks for a dwindling crowd of middle-school teachers and recovering divorcees. Monster-schlonged rivals are stealing their punters and then Geoff has an onstage panic attack. Bear down!
B, daughter of the club’s mysterious owner, is drafted in to rescue them. Jessie Mei Li squints at the guys with brisk disinterest: “None of you are men.” Armed with dubious therapy techniques and a startling disdain for empathy, she breaks them down to help the Mikes regain their magic.
Harris’s incendiary Tambo & Bones also revealed identity as commodity: Blackness as entertainment in the US of A. In Tender, porny showbiz is the entry point to discuss sex, pleasure, parenthood, what makes a man – the play is as packed as a go-go boy’s pouch, even if Harris’s pumped-up writing jiggles similar arguments a few times too often.
Matthew Xia is a director of swagger and finesse. For the showtime scenes, designer Ciarán Cunningham dials up the slutty pink lighting, but mostly we’re in a downbeat back office. Shelley Maxwell, as choreographer and intimacy director, supports high-definition actors: Dex Lee’s foghorn Geoff, Darren Bennett’s grizzly dad and Kwami Odoom, who, despite impressive core strength on the pole, is baffled when B asks if he actually enjoys sex.
The bar is low for simulating sexy fun: the job, says one of the Bears, is just flapping your dick around and seeing where the music takes you. But to meet your audience’s true desires, to tap into your own wellsprings of pleasure – that’s a whole other wobbly salami.