'Men in Waiting' Gives View From Another Side

By T. H. McCULLOH

Jan. 31, 1993 12 AM PT

T.H. McCulloh writes regularly about theater for The Times.

President Clinton’s lifting of several restrictions concerning abortions seems to have fired emotions in the ongoing dispute.

Americans probably will never agree on the subject. Oddly, what neither side takes into consideration is the involved male. Playwright James P. Mirrione is trying to fill that gap with his “Men in Waiting,” which opened this week at Hollywood’s Tamarind Theatre.

The play’s seven men, for various reasons, are spending the day in the waiting room of an abortion clinic, with an antiabortion demonstration going on outside. It is their attitudes, the emotional games they play concerning their situation, and the vast changes that take place within their hearts and minds as they confront reality that give the play its thrust.

Rebecca Taylor, who directs, first read the play several months ago without knowing that she would be involved in its staging.

“Women think it is their body,” Taylor says. “The way they cut men out is not about decision making. We cut them out of their feelings about it. That was the most interesting thing about the play when I first read it. I was very upset because I was the feminist. ‘How dare men have feelings about this!’ I had a passionate, visceral response to it. I went from political ideas to how I feel when I’m confronted in this situation. I saw what our feminism has sometimes not recognized. It was very enlightening to me as a woman.”

That men can feel at all during a traumatic moment might surprise some men. Time was when a man often didn’t even know that the woman was having an abortion.

Greg Mullavey, best known for his roles on the television series “Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman” and “Forever Fernwood,” plays one of the men in waiting. He has a pertinent personal story to share.

“It happened to me when I was in college,” Mullavey recalls. He was pinned to the homecoming queen, a minister’s daughter. “She went away and didn’t come back. I couldn’t understand why.” Mullavey tried to get in touch with her. An anonymous call led him to a New York hospital. “I thought she was just sick. A month or so later, I found out she’d had an abortion. My child. I was really upset.”

Taylor adds: “There are a lot of feelings that it happens to us , grows inside of us, that it is our body. But it is made by two people. And there are feelings on that other side. When it’s my boyfriend and I do it without telling him, there’s something that goes on inside of him that must be said.”

If Taylor has changed some of her thinking by working with the play, so have some of the actors, she says, including Mullavey. “Men have a definite point of view about this,” he says adamantly.

The nature of that point of view was the question that led Mirrione, resident playwright at New York University, to look for answers. During the New York workshop production, he discovered that some actors found the subject too disturbing to continue in the show. But they, and those who stayed, were willing, when pressed, to express their feelings.

“Men, for the most part,” Mirrione says, “will not be supportive, will not show up on that day at the clinic. The stories are legion, how they’ve not been supportive.”

“You drop the women off,” interjects Taylor. Mirrione nods.

“We drop them off,” he says, “or give them cab money. But I’m willing to bet that if you had 100 men in a room, at least half of them would say, ‘I want to know. I want to understand. Why do I have to find out on a dance floor 20 years later at a high school reunion?’ ”

“They may pretend not to understand,” Mullavey adds. “But biology is a very strong imperative, that the gene pool go on to the next generation. Even on a biological level, it’s got to interest the male.”

At abortion clinics, Mirrione talked to doctors, staff and men in waiting rooms. He also talked to other men. The information he gathered altered even some of his views on male sensitivity.

“I don’t believe that men should be categorized as unfeeling individuals who suddenly walk away when an emotional crisis happens,” he says. “We can brag in the bar, the bathroom or the gas station, but we have to admit something happens to us. We can’t put our finger on it. We’ve been too conditioned to take the easy way out.”

One thing bothering Mirrione and Taylor is that anti-abortion forces don’t mention men’s feelings. “They talk only about the issue of the fetus,” Mirrione says. “The men on that side of the fence are just thumbing rosary beads and blocking their bodies.”

Mirrione gets angry when men are categorized as villains. He’s sure that men want to understand and be involved.

“I’ve always been turned off by the stridency on both sides of the camp,” he says. “When I hear the National Organization for Women talking, I feel they’re saying that women get pregnant out of the sky. And the same with the pro-life forces, that the fetus came there by itself. What happened to us ?”

“Men in Waiting” may help audiences comprehend what happens to men. Tamarind producer Jody Kiel says both supporters and foes of abortion rights will be invited. If they don’t go at each other’s throats, they may find new insights in the previously unheard voices of the men who accompany the women to the clinics.

“Men in Waiting,” Tamarind Theatre, 5919 Franklin Ave., Hollywood. 8 p.m. Mondays through Wednesdays through March 3. $15. (213) 466-1767.