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Guys, put down that beer and see this show

Robert Dubac is one crafty dude. He's morphed Rob Becker's caveman into a hip GQ model to beguile the Vogue set, and is winking back at the rest of us guys sitting alone at bar.

Y'see, he makes this big deal about trying to get in touch with his feminine side since his girl left him two weeks ago. He wants her back, he says, but all the while he's got this knockout chi… (oops, better not go there) woman waiting in the wings. And every night, he's out there on the Amaturo stage at the Broward Center, turning hundred more bim… (oops, not there either) women into giggling mounds of Jell-O. So here we are, guys, watching all this and laughing along with the broa… (darn!) women at his joke about our beer and our mating habits. Y'think it's cute, huh? Well, guess what? Unless we can ditch this male chauvinist vocabulary, it's a cinch the women won't be callin' us when they get home tonight.

Dubac has brought his show The Male Intellect: An Oxymoron? to the Amaturo as part of the "Off Broadway On Center" theater series through next week, flanking Valentine's Day. He's making it even tougher than usual on South Florida's male species to cope with this dreaded holiday. Dubac exposes all our insecurities about the opposite sex, especially the fact that we just can't figure out what they want It's a hilarious 90-minute self-help therapy session.

And it's funny to both sexes (one guy on opening night got so carried away, he let slip a confession to the whole audience) but Dubac's take on male-dom is particularly appealing to les femmes. Dubac has been called a caveman clone, since he began his one-man battle of the sexes show some time after Becker's Defending the Caveman act. Both show explore the emotional and philosophical (and hormonal) differences between men and women. Both Dubac and Becker define male species, through the female perspective, as a#$&! (Can't go there, either)

But beyond that, they're not alike at all. Dubac, for instance, invents half dozen hilarious male characters to illustrate various aspects of the male chauvinist ethic. One of those inventions is himself whom he calls Bobby, the dumpee who's waiting for a let's-get-together phone call. While the phone sits silent on stage, Bobby pores over the rocks of his apparently shattered relationship, the two side of his brain arguing over what caused the breakup. Those are the masculine and feminine sides.

The masculine is populated by The Colonel, a cracker style, unflinching jarhead; Jean-Michel, a chauvinist pig disguised as a smoothie by means of a French accent and a philosophy of "abstract fatalism"; Fast Eddie, who loves women and leaves'em before they leave him; Old Mr. Linger, age 100 plus and still waiting for the perfect woman; Ronnie Cabrezzi, a 50's Blackhoard Jungle style lothario. Each has a lengthy biography in the program.

The feminine side is a voice that radiates from fashionable window treatment on the left side of the stage, where the scenery representing the feminine intellect is navigable. On the right are the disheveled digs of guys' side of the brain, and none of us want to go there other than for a beer.

There's something in the air over there, too: a lot of profanity including all seven of the no-no words. If that doesn't bother you, you'll want to go to the Amaturo whether you're single or attached, or even temporarily platonic to see how much human interior design has evolved from cave dwellings. You'll enjoy finsing how much - and how little.

- Jack Zink

THE SUN-SENTINEL | February, 2000 | Review Index