Word: clive
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...Enter Clive's friend Harry Bagley (Robert de Neufville), a middle-aged Banana poster-boy with a handlebar mustache. Betty wants him, really wants him, but he decides he'd rather have her as a pure inspiration than a roll...
...they go off stage to do it. Hey, at least they go offstage. That's not the case with Clive and Mrs. Saunders (Vonnie Roemer), a widow who enjoys flogging. Clive expresses passions for her that have no place in the patronizing domesticity of his marriage. She resists his advances at first, but to no avail. Undeterred, Clive sticks his head under her skirt and they have a jolly good time...
Victoria, played by a doll in the first act, is now played by Cori Lynn Peterson, who was her grandmother in the first act. David Travis, formerly Clive, is now the goofy, spoiled toddler Kathy, whose mother is Victoria's friend Lynn (Vonnie Roemer). Bryan van Gorder and Jennifer Sun have exchanged roles, so that both Edward and Betty are played by the right sex. In the latter's case, this may mean that son and mother have found their true selves: he is gay, and she has left Clive and found...
...only moving moment in the second act is Betty's monologue near the end, when she talks about how she used to masturbate when she was little until her mother found out and made her stop. Now that she's left Clive, she's started doing it again, and has discovered that she is a real person in her own right without a man to give her an identity. The previous Betty (Bryan van Gorder) comes out and embraces her as the play ends...
While presenting Clive's and Martin's versions of the heterosexual marriage as oppressive, the play judges the other relationships more leniently simply because they subvert this patriarchal normalcy. Harry's relationship with Edward in the first act is nothing but child abuse, and his fling with Joshua, the servant, can be seen as imperialistic exploitation. But these "relationships" are portrayed as merely alternative lifestyles, the gleeful return of the repressed in Clive's oh-so-normal British household...