The Royal Court Theatre’s Olivier Award-winning play COCK has received more rave reviews. Written by Mike Bartlett, directed by James Macdonald and starring Jason Butler Harner as M, Amanda Quaid as W, Cory Michael Smith as John and Cotter Smith as F, COCK is now playing Off-Broadway at The Duke on 42nd Street, a NEW 42nd STREET project, 229 West 42nd Street.
THE NEW YORKER
The unspoken message of Eno’s smart, bleak musings seems to be: enjoy the nothingness while you can. Bisexuality, according to Woody Allen, “Immediately doubles your chances for a date on Saturday night.” But, as the British playwright Mike Bartlett’s robust and rollicking “Cock” (vivaciously directed by James Macdonald, at the Duke on 42nd Street) demonstrates, it also doubles your trouble. A gay man who lives with M (the witty Jason Butler Harner), John (Corry Michael Smith) is tempted away by W (the spirited Amanda Quaid). Bartlett’s dialogue crackles and pops with the rhetoric of vituperation. John insists on bringing W to a dinner that M cooks and to which M invites his father (Cotter Smith), as a wild card. There is a battle royal; there is also a winner. With its exhilarating contest, “Cock” elevates John into a totem of today’s sexual merry-go-round. He’s not spoiled for choice; he’s spoiled by it.
-John Lahr, The New Yorker
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NEW YORK MAGAZINE
John (Cory Michael Smith) has a decision to make: Does he stay with M (Jason Butler Harner), his longtime male lover? Or commit to his new girlfriend W (Amanda Quaid), the first woman he’s ever slept with? But this isn’t a drearily literal diddle on the nature of bisexuality, or even some milquetoast meditation on small-i “identity.” There’s a bigger question on the table: “Why are you telling me I have to know what I am?” asks John, not impishly, not pertinently, desperately even. “It doesn’t matter. I love him because he makes me toast in bed and he’s scared of plastic bags. I love her because she makes me feel as old as I really am.”
Mike Bartlett (Earthquakes in London) is a shiveringly gifted young playwright who conflates the political and the personal so cunningly, you barely realize what he’s pulled off until he’s got you cold. John may be his most wonderfully frustrating creation to date, a fantastically incoherent boy-man who speaks brilliantly and brutally to an entire’s generation’s post-Boomer nebulousness.
-Scott Brown, New York Magazine
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Tickets for COCK are available by calling The Duke on 42nd Street Box Office at 646-223-3010 or online at www.Dukeon42.org Box office hours are Tuesday-Fridays from 4:00 PM to 8:00 PM, Saturdays from 12:00 PM to 8:00 PM and Sundays from 1:00 PM to 7:00 PM.
The performance schedule is Tuesday through Friday at 8pm, Saturday at 2pm and 8pm, and Sunday at 3pm and 7pm.
Click here to watch a sneak peek at the production.
For more information about COCK, visit www.CockfightPlay.com.
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“_ _ _ _” (The Cockfight Play)
OR
“_ _ _ _” (www.CockfightPlay.com)