In “Defending the Caveman,” a 21st-century man, dressed in factory-made clothing, settles into a Flintstones-like rock couch beside a similar anachronistic stone-slab TV, to share his views on men and women.
Perched on his living room throne, this man doesn’t play the victim or construct a strong-armed diatribe on behalf of the male species. Instead, he recounts a chance meeting with a caveman and he reaches back to prehistoric times and delves into the behavioral and social sciences, highlighting the disparities between the sexes in pursuit of the middle ground. Part of the goal is to make audiences laugh, and in the history of “Defending the Caveman,” which holds the title of the “Longest-running One-Man Show on Broadway,” they nearly always do. But it’s not at the contemporary “Neanderthal” raving and ranting upon the stage; it’s at themselves. Over the centuries, the inner-workings of a man and a woman haven’t changed much since women were gatherers and men were hunters, he claims, and he’ll show you why.
As the story goes, Comedian Rob Becker created the show in response to cocktail chatter that got him thinking. At the time, the message was, “A man should be more like a woman,” but what Becker discovered was, perhaps, it had more to do with “the way we’re built.” And the theory has seemed to resonate with men and women alike.
“Defending the Caveman” comes to Park City’s Egyptian Theatre for three nights this week beginning Thursday, after a legendary run on Broadway in the mid-1990s: Between 1995, when it debuted and 1996, creator Rob Becker staged a record of 399 performances for a one-man play that still stands to this day.
The show has since taken on a life of its own with productions worldwide, played by six actors.
Michael Van Osch, who has traveled the country as one of the solo stars of the show since 2004, will perform in Park City. A man who once fit the profile of an everyday man himself (as a boy, he played hockey and as an adult, launched a career in sports marketing) the actor says he’s learned a lot from the play and that, more often then not, the lessons bring audiences together.
“This happens a lot of times: I’ll see a couple sitting together, bit on the outside of their seats, like as far away from each other as they can get, because they got into a fight in the parking lot or something,” Van Osch says. “Then, as the play goes on, they start to nudge each other, start to wink at each other and say, ‘Hey that’s you,’ and “That’s you,’ and by the end of the play, they’re sitting there, arm-in-arm and they get up and walk out with their arms around each other.”
“Defending the Caveman” was Van Osch’s first gig after he decided to leave Atlanta for New York City in 2004.
Up until “Defending the Caveman,” Van Osch had only been a part of ensemble casts in independent films and in theater. Since 2005, he has been busy touring the country and Canada a week to two weeks out of every month, performing in places like Cleveland, Des Moines and Montreal. “People ask me all the time if I’m bored of it yet, but it’s not hard for me,” he explains. “Sometimes I do two shows a day. The first show gets you pumped up for the next one. The lights turn up and it’s show time.”
Van Osch credits the success of “Defending the Caveman” to “an energetic script” that allows actors to make the performance their own, and entertains an audience for the entire 90 minutes.
“I saw the originator, Rob Becker, perform in 1999 and then five years later, I moved to New York and it was literally the first audition I had, and I ended up getting it,” he says. “The script is really great and I really appreciated it. It’s not setup, setup, joke. It really is a play that takes people on a journey from the beginning to the end of a story. I think it’s why it’s gone on so long. People don’t get sick of it because of the way it’s written It keeps people entertained, but it also keeps people listening.”
People identify with the play because it picks up on the real-life clashes that face most heterosexual couples, according to Van Osch. “For instance, if a woman says something a man doesn’t understand, I think we’re OK with that, we think women are mysterious. But if a man says something a woman doesn’t understand, they just think we’re wrong,” he explains. “We’re not so different than we were in the Stone Age. We’re still pretty much the same animals, even though the world is modern, and if we don’t respect that, we’re going to be in trouble all the time, expecting things from the other person, the other sex, that they can’t give.”
“What works about ‘Defending the Caveman’ is that it’s out to say, ‘Hey, we’re not wrong, we’re just different.’ It doesn’t bash anyone. It really celebrates the man, but it also celebrates the woman. It’s about realizing and respecting the differences.”
“In the play, I take everyone right back to prehistoric times and show how men were hunters and women were gatherers and how we bring it forward to the present and show how those differences relate to the activities that we do today.”
Van Osch says the advice has helped to sustain his real-life relationship with his own girlfriend. “What I’ve learned is that, if someone is getting on your nerves or you feel like you’re getting under their skin, it may be the way he or she communicates,” he says. “Taking that into account, taking a step back, has really helped us take our relationship further. We’ve been together now for five years.”
See ‘Defending the Caveman’
What: a one-man comedy show that delves into the ‘battle of the sexes’ from the comfort of the living room couch.
When: Thursday through Saturday, April 17 through 19 at 7:30 p.m.
Where: The Egyptian Theatre on Main Street
Ticket information: Regular seating is $37.50; Cabaret Tables are $47. Purchase tickets by calling (435)
649-9371 or online by logging onto parkcityshows.com.