Battle of the Sex-less

Staggering, if you calculate potential profits -- the royalties this author could have collected over a couple millennia and change. If only Aristophanes had hired a savvier agent. (Try Ari Gold, babe.)

When there's war in the world (when isn't there?), "Lysistrata," the A-Man's 411 B.C. anti-war soapbox-as-sex comedy -- women refuse to heed their soldier-hubbies' carnal needs until they abandon the battlefield -- rivals the relentlessness of "Law & Order" reruns.

As Uncle Sam's ensnared in Iraq, it's theater's default political protest, cast as a pro-fem fun ride: Oliver Stone meets Hillary Clinton meets "American Pie," but with ancient Grecian Tara Reids.

Locally, "Lysistrata" was trotted out by the College of Southern Nevada and Insurgo Theater Movement. Now Nevada Conservatory Theatre unleashes its own legion of leg-locked wives in a ribald riff that's rife with contemporary jabs and exaggerated anatomical imagery.

"I wouldn't even know how to pigeonhole this," says a giggly Robert Brewer, the theater's artistic director who gave the go-ahead to director Robert Benedetti's way-left-of-center concept. "When I heard about this, men and women in separate sections, people throwing Nerf balls at each other, and it's a semimusical, it sounded so wonderful."

Prep for an interactive evening: Audiences will be separated by sex on opposite sides of the circular stage to ignite some battle-of-the-sexes sizzle (couples seating is set aside for those preferring not to engage in gender combat). "The women and men onstage serve as cheerleaders for their sections of the audience," Benedetti says. "There'll be a lot of yelling and throwing of vegetables (in the form of pillows, so leave the celery sticks and Brussels sprouts at home) and hurling invective back and forth."

As the Peloponnesian War drags on between the warriors of Athens and Sparta, Lysistrata (Katie Mazzola) rallies the initially reluctant ladies to withhold spousal services, as Greece takes on an American tint.

"We're not trying to denigrate anyone's patriotism, though this administration does come in for a certain amount of good fun," says Benedetti, whose updated script skewers such fat, juicy targets as Dick Cheney and Halliburton, the Office of Homeland Security, color-coded security alerts, "the surge" and enemy "detainees," while tossing in contemporary touches like booty-bumping greetings and singing to the melody of "99 Bottles of Beer on the Wall."

Benedetti insists the messages won't drown beneath the madness. "We're stressing it's not just withholding sex, but the refusal to produce more children to be sent off to war. The underlying issue I hope comes through the manic comedy the way it does in Charlie Chaplin's 'Modern Times' or 'The Great Dictator,' " says Benedetti, who first mounted this production at Carnegie Mellon University -- featuring future "Who's the Boss" star Judith Light as Lysistrata -- in 1968, then alluding to the Vietnam War.

"The more dangerous something is, the more you need to be able to make fun of it in order to render it harmless, which is what Aristotle said is the function of comedy."

As soldiers grow increasingly desperate to, well, launch their projectiles, brace for outrageous sight gags, including a rainbow array of giant, serpent-style phalluses, the actors they're attached to breaking into a soft-shoe shuffle in straw hats and canes.

"We made them outrageous to be less offensive than if they were realistic," Benedetti says. "They're so much a part of the action that if you toned them down, it would lose its energy and comic bite."

When a male character snorts at the notion of a woman's actions altering the affairs of state, the presence of a certain presidential candidate bubbles beneath the satirical surface. "My political views are neither here nor there," stresses star Mazzola, "and regardless of whether Hillary wins, it's great that we're at a place where she has a chance to be president and to suggest in this show that women can be that powerful, that they have something important to say because we have a different experience in the world. This will be a cool theater experience for people, if they let it."

All this "Lysistrata" needs now is a few Greek gods from central casting. If we remember our mythology, they were named Viagra, Levitra and Cialis.

Contact reporter Steve Bornfeld at sbornfeld@reviewjournal.com or (702) 383-0256.