"I don't want to come off as misogynist," said Kevin Cannon, the man behind a risk-taking venture in writing, and presentation, that's arriving downtown this weekend. At the Wings Theatre on Christopher Street, Cannon is directing himself and seven other men in biographically based pieces called "Manologues" - a clear riff off Eve Ensler's "Vagina Manologues," but with a distinct masculine perspective - one that according to Cannon is underrepresented in our contemporary media landscape. The show includes the director himself recalling with pain his role at age 18 - that is, minimal - in deciding about his girlfriend's abortion, and the riotously deadpan Teddy Angelus presenting an intricately worked-out theory of men and women as wildly different denizens of the animal kingdom.
Such humor is deeply rooted, of course. A recent reprint of James Thurber's classic essays and cartoons, "Thurber Country," collected from The New Yorker and elsewhere, reminded me that its original subtitle was "About Males and Females, Mainly of Our Own Species." Cannon says writing anti-women rants (what he calls "the Andrew Dice Clay stuff") is easy. Instead of harping on division, his team is attempting the harder task of "looking for common ground, where we can maybe have some discussion and debate." I wish the guys luck.
