What I liked
NAWhat I didn't like
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My overall impression
Michael Shaw Fisher has pulled a mad, sexed up, ferociously unscrupulous rabbit from his impresario’s hat. Behold, it dances obscenely across Theater Row like the chestburster in “Alien.” No one can get hold of it, and people are scared. And they should be scared.
“Not I,” you object. “I’m a seasoned patron of the arts. A certified aesthete, by God! My sensibility was honed over decades at countless plays and festivals from New York to London, in countless readings of the Paris Almanac de Théâtre. Nothing catches me off guard.”
You are hazardously wrong. You have fantastically missed the point. You should zip your lips and your jeans and keep your wits about you.
This very instant Fisher’s randy rabbit is twerking its way in and out of enlightened lobbies and all-gender restrooms around Santa Monica and Vine, all the while squeaking out a truly horrifying question, a question we’ve all agreed must never be uttered and to which not even you have an answer. And you should. You really should.
This is what theater was intended to do. “The job of the actor,” wrote David Mamet, “is not to be liked. The job of the actor is to make the audience want to put their heads on spikes.”
The question at the indecent, subversive, and finally broken heart of “The Amazing Sex Life of Rabbits” provokes such a response. Between scandalized laughs, the attentive audience member, however cultured, will by degrees begin to squirm— first a little, then a lot. There in the dimness she will find herself looking about nervously, wanting help. There will be no help, however. Fisher’s bawdy bunny offers only that merciless, unanswerable question.
My reader will be forgiven for wanting to know what that question is. I’ve already made clear that civilized people have agreed never to utter it, but I am nonetheless inclined to take the risk. I’m not sure why. Perhaps it’s because I care and want to prepare you. Or maybe I, like Fisher himself, just can’t help myself:
What’s your price?
