If, like me, you found The Vagina Monologues more tedious than tantalising, you’ll find this play a much more satisfying experience.

Geraldine Brophy does most blokes proud in the way she represents them and their sexuality. The funny skits are a scream, while the more serious ones stay with you long after the three actors have left the stage.

The format is very much like the female version, where the cast of three present a real mix of stories. The ages represented range from three-year-old Christopher to a psychologically scarred priest in his 40s to a war veteran in his 80s who remembers the death of a colleague with absolute, heartbreaking clarity decades later.

Eddie Campbell tells the veteran’s tale so eloquently that you could swear it comes from his own life. Paul Barrett is unnerving as the gay male stalking gay bars, part hunter, part prey, but it’s his heartbreaking portrayal of battered husband Colin that will stay in my memory.

Paul McLaughlin is a delight as 14-year-old Dominic who’s a passionate advocate of masturbation, but again, it’s a serious role that delivers the king hit. Michael is a priest forever damaged by the brutality and ignorance of his father, yet he sees it as a blessing. Truly chilling.

Brophy’s monologues are succinct and well written, with the right ration of funny to serious. The only weak link is a horse race commentary using nicknames for – well, you know what for. In The Vagina Monologues the women tended to remain seated, but here they are given the whole stage to work with. The three actors have non-speaking roles to play in their colleagues’ monologues, which works well too. A strong start to the Wellington theatre year.

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A memorable moment occurred in at a Writers and Readers Week forum in Wellington some years ago. Responding to the notion that writers were supposed to write what they knew, E Annie Proulx (The Shipping News, Brokeback Mountain …) was aghast: "That’d bore me shitless!" she exclaimed. "What I don’t know, what I wanna know: that’s what gets me out of bed in the mornings." Or words to that effect.

Proulx canvassed the panel of women writers to discover that all five (including herself) were writing novels with men as the central characters and three were writing him in the first person. A seismic shift was felt in the room: creative writing allowed discovery, not just reportage.

Little wonder, then, that Geraldine Brophy has tackled the abiding mystery of men by writing 15 monologues for diverse male characters, from toddlers through childhood and adolescence to adulthood; from brotherhood through parenthood to grandparenthood; from a gay man who sells his body to women to a celibate priest;  a self-absorbed wanker to a lonely veteran; a taciturn Kiwi bloke to a robust European septuagenarian …

In a recent Capital Times interview Brophy reveals she was largely inspired to write this work by the concern she felt about the mixed messages her nephew was getting about his place in the world as a boy. "Young boys as little as 10 and 11 are seen as potential rapists. The play tries to show the balance. Because men are notoriously bad, it seems, at speaking out on their own behalf."

Performed by three actors, The Viagra Monologues – originally entitled Man Overboard – premiered in Auckland in August 2003. The Wellington season, at Bats, is well overdue. As the other reviewers for this site have attested, Paul Barrett, Paul McLaughlin and Eddie Campbell deliver a compelling 90-odd minutes of insight, humour, challenge and human compassion.

As director, Geraldine Brophy mercifully avoids the foolish restrictions of high stools and microphones employed the world-over for Eve Ensler’s The Vagina Monologues, allowing her actors to explore each character’s physicality as well as their vocal range. With less-is-more simplicity, all three bring an intelligent awareness and understanding to their work, counter-pointing the wry humour with moments of equally well-judged dramatic intensity.

Paul Barrett bookends the show with 3 year-old Christopher – full of news about his new toy crocodile and new baby sister – and his newly immigrated grandfather, who bought Christopher the crocodile and, in a new relationship, is enjoying the benefits of the little blue pill. In between he gives us a predatory gay businessman, an Aussie bloke bereft of his chainsaw who learns to love his member at a men’s self-awareness workshop, an appallingly abused husband tragically trapped, and a loving father suddenly fated to be a widower and solo parent. Barrett’s vocal versatility is especially impressive.

The extraordinary ability Paul McLaughlin has to become different people with the subtlest shifts in body, tone and inner being see him metamorphose through a teenage wanker, a well hung hero, the aforementioned sex worker and a loyal if myopic mate to the priest so painfully committed to his celibacy. Robert Larsen’s astute lighting design may have something to do with it, but the boyish purity of that priest is truly spooky.

With his characteristic gruffness, Eddie Campbell completes the trio with a Kiwi tourist deeply into melons, a war veteran whose mates paid dearly for losing their virginity in Cairo, a wise and compassionate executive who eschews victimhood for ‘eldering’ (mentoring a young criminal towards better choices) and – with a sudden and surprising lightness – an eight-year-old telling it like it is with his dad.

The penultimate sketch is a pun-riddled sports-cast. All three discuss the merit of the various penile contenders then Barrett brings it to a climax with a race-call that features such pearlers as "My Wanking Willy might just pull it off!"

All in all a liberating experience.

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Gloria Steinem wrote in her foreword to the script of Eve Ensler’s The Vagina Monologues that she came from the "down there" generation; Victoria Wood said in her day, in a magazine, you didn’t have sex, you had a row of dots.

There are neither dots nor euphemisms in Geraldine Brophy’s warm, touching, often very funny, clear-eyed view of masculinity seen through the experiences of 15 contemporary New Zealand males ranging in age from 3 to 86.

While her title echoes the internationally successful show by Eve Ensler, it is slightly misleading as Viagra is only mentioned in the last of the sixteen vignettes, and the presentation of her material is far more engaging than the often impersonal, lecture-style of The Vagina Monologues, and audience-drawing guest stars reading extracts would be totally out of place.

The vignettes cover a wide range of social types (cutesy 3-year-old to an old soldier who fought at El Alamein) and a goodly mix of sexual and emotional pleasures and problems. There is also thrown in for good measure a comic sketch that might have come from an old varsity Extrav which can best be described as a phallic horse-race – and much more fun than Reclaiming the C Word in The Vagina Monologues.

But every time it seems that Geraldine Brophy is just ticking off another topic from a list of case-book studies (celibacy/male prostitution /parenthood/testicular cancer/etc) she and her three actors reveal the men behind the studies with an emotional punch that silenced the embarrassed gigglers and had the opening night audience vigorously applauding every vignette.

Eddie Campbell, as a 52-year-old executive explaining his reasons for "eldering" a troubled teenager and as a young soldier recounting his visit with mates to a Cairo brothel, Paul McLaughlin, as a quietly spoken priest describing how he was forced into the priesthood and as a man who calls himself a prostitute not a gigolo, and Paul Barrett describing the joys of late fatherhood and revealing the loneliness of a middle-aged homosexual, are all excellent.

In the theatre at least, men have found a champion in Geraldine Brophy and it is her empathy as an actress, director, and playwright that allows her to view them with a generosity of spirit that is welcome after years of put-downs and comic ridicule.

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The Viagra Monologues, written and directed by Geraldine Brophy, presents the masculine perspective on various issues. Having enjoyed other plays that Brophy has written, particularly the 2006 Fringe Festival performance of Real Estate and Downstage’s 2005 production of Confessions of a Chocoholic, I was looking forward to this one.

Your first thought might be to question how a woman, lacking in the requisite equipment, is going to knowledgeably present a piece that revolves around the possession of a penis. Peter Elliot responds to this within the programme notes and you can rest assured that it is not an issue.

Paul Barrett, Paul McLaughlin and Eddie Campbell take it in turns to present 15 separate monologues. Each monologue is standalone and each explores a different aspect of masculinity. Paul Barrett does a particularly good job of presenting his parts, with the more emotionally poignant roles on the whole being assigned to him. Whilst the topics selected are invariably serious in their own right, the tone of the show is definitely on humour. Well what else could it be when we’re talking about a show inspired by the last turkey in the shop?

We start with three year old Christopher, who wonders why his new "brother" has no penis. Claude tells us of his best ever sexual encounter in one of the more amusing monologues – seriously, pay attention to this one. Dominic extols the virtues of masturbation, an activity that only his love of rugby league can interrupt. Glenn, or Captain Pants, is waiting for the right woman, one that can accommodate his special needs. Beavan is a business man with a taste for brief encounters in gay bars. Eric is a brash Australian who turns to a male support group to help him through his divorce. 86 year old war veteran, Bertie, talks of visiting an Egyptian brothel. Colin suffers the stigma of being a battered husband. Tim is a prostitute, but not a gigolo. Bryan is a successful businessman who has his car stolen at knifepoint. Dibs advises us to check for testicular cancer before it’s too late. Liam is a new father, facing new challenges in one of the more moving segments. Michael is a priest, grateful to his father for helping him find his calling in a piece that will bring tears to the eyes for very different reasons. Henry is an energetic 8 year old boy, who idolises his dad. Finally, we meet Anton, a 75 year-old man who knows how to keep a woman happy.

This is a show that could as easily be performed as a solo spot or with 15 different actors. In reality, the title would more appropriately be The Penis Monologues, as the little blue pill does not receive much of a look in within the play. However, that does not scan as well as The Viagra Monologues and a little poetic licence must be granted. The play’s title is deliberately evocative of The Vagina Monologues and as such it must bear comparison with its elder sister. Whilst it is certainly well performed and written, it somehow lacks a certain energy. Personally, I think the emancipation of the male species is not as compelling an issue to address and as such the sense of liberation that The Vagina Monologues created is the missing factor. If you haven’t seen The Vagina Monologues, you won’t make the comparison. Even if you have, The Viagra Monologues will still make you laugh. And at times, you’ll want to cry – but of course real men don’t do that.

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If you thought this show might be overloaded with jokes about the little blue pill that makes men smile and woman groan the world over, you’re in for a pleasant surprise. These dramatic monologues run the gamut of a male sexuality, albeit fictional, that is so thorough and wide-ranging it leaves little to be desired. The spam-spawning drug doesn’t gets a look in – until the end, of course.

It’s interesting that this penetrating stuff – a ‘male version’ of Eve Ensler’s runaway hit, ‘The Vagina Monologues’ – has been written by a woman…There could be a thesis in that… By a woman… Suffice to say, Geraldine Brophy must be applauded for her chutzpah in doing the job on men’s experience in sex. That she pulls it off so well, with such graphic flair that we’re carried along, completely convinced by some quite outlandish propositions, and with the full support of any male you’d care to consult, either on or offstage, is a fantastic achievement. The work’s strength seems to lie in the range of character types and the aptness of the idioms with which these boys give voice to their feelings about the sex they’ve had. Or not.
   
The three seasoned performers here seem to relish these meaty roles. We are won over from the start by Paul Barrett’s earnest, chattering 3-year-old who is waiting for a penis to grow on his baby sister. As the various roles interweave, Barrett returns as a ‘meat’-hunting gay man in a nightclub, an Australian in a men’s support group (ho ho), a sickeningly loyal, battered husband and a widower with a baby daughter.

Paul McLaughlin has most of the sunnier roles and has a lot fun with ‘his blokes’: doing the ‘down, brown’ rhythms of a white teen rapper giving his wrist a professional-level, muscle-relieving shakedown between wanks (‘You gotta work out your aggro on your brick’). He also plays a car salesman slash male prostitute, a ‘good, keen man’ wracked with emphysema in the pub and, by contrast – intense and scary, downstage – as a tortured priest telling of his own childhood abuse.

Mateship and father-son relationships see Eddie Campbell create some very poignant moments, too, both as older men – a returned serviceman remembering a fateful visit to a Cairo brothel during WWII, a businessman mugged by a kid who reminds him of a lost son – and as a happy eight-year-old who idolises his father; to describe but a few.

Each story is enhanced by the monochromatic simplicity of Rob Larsen’s lighting scheme. Together with Ross Joblin’s set of ubiquitous boxes, the extremely minimalist design focuses our attention on the human person, the mound of flesh and blood, in the suit on the boards in front of us.

This play – Brophy’s first – premiered at the Herald Theatre in Auckland in 2003 and this outing finds it honed almost to perfection. I’m not going to tell you how parts are drawn together at the end but the piece has a very satisfying shape. I do think it could still be improved by a final snipping of what you could call the deadheads – where lines or moves remain to strive for an effect that has already been achieved, and so detract. (An example would be the RSA man whistling the Colonel Bogey/’River Kwai’ tune as the outro of his piece.) It is a mark of quality here that cliché and the cheesy pun stick out like the proverbials.
 
But this baby – more vital than its handle might imply, packed with laughs and with a big, warm heart – certainly deserves the rapturous reception it got from the audience last night. I think it’s got legs. It’s got universal appeal. I reckon it’ll be bounding across the Tasman before you know it. And onto the West End. I don’t see why not.

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