A Man’s Play : A playwright in search of an appropriate role model creates a series of vignettes about male bonding and the father-son relationship

Time to beat those drums. Men are bonding at the Odyssey Theatre.

The newest entry in the male-liberation movement is Gregg Loughridge’s “Virtus,” a four-member song-and-dialogue paean to the joys, fears and frustrations of being a modern-day man. The show, an hourlong assemblage of solo pieces, group chants, martial arts displays and father-son scenarios, originally bowed in 1991--with the author in the cast--at the Empty Space Theatre in his home base of Seattle. For this incarnation, Loughridge, 36, is directing.

“It started out of my own explorations,” he noted. “Growing up in the ‘60s, most of my mentors were women. It wasn’t my father’s fault; he wasn’t this horrible absentee figure. That’s just what was going on then. So I grew up with a real good development of my feminine side. In the ‘70s, I was part of the feminist movement, the anti-war movement. In my late 20s, I found I wanted to explore the masculine part of myself.”

Yet when he looked around for male images in the media, “they were either corporate, insensitive types, or the big, stupid jock thing. There was no emotional role model for men--and I was trying to have my emotions. Also, this was a way to get back to an old style of theater: mythology, where theater was really a school for the soul, instead of an intellectual chess game. I see the piece as very musical; even the dramatic scenes are like duets and trios.”

Odyssey Theatre artistic director Ron Sossi agrees. “It harks very much to a style of theater we don’t see a lot anymore: stylized ritual, movement, song--it uses a lot of those techniques.” As for the subject matter, Sossi said, “The male bonding thing is very much in the wind these days. And this is not done in a heavy-handed way. Also, through the years, we’ve done a lot of women’s pieces. So this is a good thing to do, to balance that out.”

Loughridge is quick to point out that although the piece is about males, it’s not anti-female--and not intended to exclude any group. Yet he acknowledges that some audience members have come in “with loaded guns.”

“The relationship between the sexes is a complicated thing,” emphasized the writer, whose significant other, Frances Kenny, designed the costumes for this show--and also “The Kentucky Cycle” at the Taper. “People want to make it simple, but it’s not. Also, when it comes to being intimidated by other men, reconciling with your father, exploring the fun of working together--I don’t think those are necessarily male things.”

In the show’s darkest segment, a man alone on a street with a female stranger realizes that she’s probably regarding him as a potential rapist; gradually, scarily, he comes to investigate that possibility within himself. “It’s about looking at the side of yourself you don’t know,” explained the writer, “that maniac we all have inside us.”

The show’s bio lists Loughridge as “writer/director/composer,” and, indeed, he is uncomfortable with the label playwright.

“I don’t consider myself a playwright,” he said. Born in Ohio, schooled in New York, baptized in the performance art ranks, Loughridge did “the itinerant actor thing” at the New Jersey, Idaho and Oregon Shakespeare festivals and worked as a Celtic musician with the group Criona. As an adapter, his credits include Alice Gerstanberg’s “Overtones” and Michael Ondaatje’s “The Collected Works of Billy the Kid”; his next project is an environmental mini-opera based on the Faust legend.

Regardless of the subject matter, Loughridge is a staunch believer in the educative, spiritual and curative powers of the stage.

“Theater is a place for things you can’t get out of the newsroom or the classroom,” he said, “a place to stir up the soup. Also, with the times we’re living in, we need someplace that you can go for mystery--for that sense of magic, wonder. I didn’t get that in the religion I was raised in. We need that, no matter how sophisticated we are. Another thing lacking in this country is a sense of community, feeling that you’re a part of something. It’s one reason I developed this piece--to create that sense of community.”

“Virtus” plays at 8 p.m. Thursdays through Saturdays and 7 p.m. Sundays through March 15 at the Odyssey Theatre, 2055 S. Sepulveda Blvd., West Los Angeles. Tickets: $15.50 to $19.50. Call (310) 477-2055.