ABSTRACT
In none of his plays is the frenetic energy of city life more apparent than in Sexual Perversity in Chicago, which was voted best Chicago play of 1974, and, after an Off-Off-Broadway run in 1975, won an Obie award for its Off-Broadway production. In his essay 'The Put-Together Girl', written in the mid-1960s, Tom Wolfe wrote of the vogue for silicone injections among women: Carol Doda's doctor on Ocean Avenue in San Francisco has an on-going waiting list of women of all sorts, not showgirls, who want the series of injections. Dan Shapiro is described as an urban male, and Bernie Litko as his 'friend and associate', a phrase that suggests the invasion of personal relationships by commercial values. Bernie sees himself as experienced in the ways of women, a teacher. Sexual Perversity in Chicago paints a bleak portrait of a deeply uncommunal country where the relationship between the sexes has been crudely mythicized.
