Be sure to pick up a playbill before you sit down for a performance of Sex Tips for Straight Women from a Gay Man at the Straz Center’s Jaeb Theater. Not only because you’ll want to check out the bona fides of the talented three-member cast, but because you’ll need to roll up your program as a prop when sexpert Dan Anderson (Grant MacDermott) trains a camera on you to see whether you’ve mastered his recommended hand-job regimen of “Up, Twist, Over and Down.”
So, yes, let that be a warning: This is audience-participation theater. If you don’t want to be pulled up on stage to practice nipple-tweaking technique on hunky tech assistant Stefan (Danny Bernardy), then you’re probably better off not sitting in the front row.
To be sure, the elegant older woman who was recruited for this task on Friday night looked like she would have rather been home watching Antiques Roadshow than caressing a stranger’s pecs, but her genteel demeanor was atypical of the room. This was a ladies’ night, Magic Mike XXL kind of crowd, hooting and hollering at every embarrassing moment and racy tidbit.
And later on, another grandmotherly type got the biggest laughs of the night, as, blindfolded, she tried to mime Anderson’s tips on the basics of ball-tickling. Her gestures — increasingly creative, albeit wildly off-scale — prompted MacDermott to ask the audience, “How big are your balls in Tampa?”
Full disclosure: I know the “real” Dan Anderson, that is to say the author who used that name as his pseudonym when, with Maggie Berman (also a nom de plume), he wrote the best-selling book on which the stage show is based. A Philadelphia arts administrator at the time it was published in 1997, he has yet to reveal his true identity to the world, as far as I can tell, so I won’t. But I will say that the adaptation, which premiered Off Broadway in 2014, succeeds at two tricky tasks: capturing his mischievous spirit and turning a self-help book, not the most naturally dramatizable of texts, into a play.
The setting chosen by playwright Matt Murphy doesn’t sound all that promising: a Meet the Author series at a local community college at which Anderson is the guest lecturer. But that format lends itself nicely to getting the audience involved, as Anderson shanghais shy moderator Robyn (Amanda Huxtable) into helping him deliver his message of better living through BJs — and in the process does a makeover on Robyn and helps her realize the lusty lady she really is.
Huxtable mugs a bit heavily at first, but she’s very funny as she not-so-gradually doffs her inhibitions. Bernardy as Stefan, with his sort-of-Russian accent, tight Henley and seductive swagger, manages to be both a credible and a comic sex object.
And MacDermott is a wonder. A protean actor who can shift from flamboyant to sly to butch in seconds, he controls the room from the moment he hits the stage — and not just because he comes equipped with a full complement of audio-visual bells and whistles, including a device that looks like a Star Wars weapon and explodes confetti at an opportune moment.
All told, Sex Tips would make an ideal Valentine’s gift, especially for its target audience of straight women, who were there in much greater numbers than men — gay, straight, or otherwise. With its message essentially being “Do try this at home,” it’s a gift that could keep on giving all weekend long.
Sex Tips for Straight Women from a Gay Man: Sat., Feb. 13, 2 & 7 p.m.; Sun., Feb. 14, at 2 p.m. Jaeb Theater at Straz Center, Tampa. $45-$55. strazcenter.org
This article appears in Feb 11-17, 2016.