Wrong door leads to a wild evening

I have a friend who has been to our house many times and gets lost every time. Once he became so lost that he finally gave up and returned home. I was just glad he wasn’t still out there hours later wandering around in the dark.

I thought this unusual until I was discussing the matter with another friend (I have two) who had made kind of a study of men becoming lost under the easiest of circumstances.

He concluded that it was a male trait fueled by glandular secretions and impacted by electronic impulses from the id. In other words, men are damned certain where they’re going but often wrong, their judgment blurred by aggression and ego.

I have a case in point.

My wife and I were heading to a play a few nights ago at the Hudson Theatres in Hollywood to see a Jazz Age musical called “The Wild Party.” It appealed to me because of an interest in the so-called Roaring ‘20s and vague memories of wild parties I had attended in my wild party days.

Even though I can become lost backing out of the driveway, I found the theaters without any trouble. Notice, I say theaters, plural, because there are two of them, right next to each other. But at the time, I didn’t know that.

There are 99-seat houses throughout the L.A. area, from Santa Monica to the San Fernando Valley, scattered equivalents of New York’s off-Broadway venues. We go to many and have seen plays equally as good as anything at the Mark Taper Forum.

On this particular night, I picked up tickets at will call and was leading the way toward the door of the theater when Cinelli, ever on the alert for my misjudgments, said, “Isn’t it in there?” pointing to a door near one of two box offices.

I replied in the manly fashion of a Roman centurion leading his troops against the Visigoths, “No, woman, it is this way!” I marched right on through the door, accompanied by the doubtful Cinelli who, as we sat, said, “Are you sure?”

I chuckled in a condescending manner and said, “Of course.”

The performance began with a Jim Carrey look-alike named Patrick O’Sullivan as a kind of narrator, striding and leaping back and forth across the stage to set up the twisted, traumatic, agonizing depictions to come.

Then we began seeing a drama that involved a tormented racially mixed young couple, a dysfunctional mother and son psychiatric team, and a lithe erotic fantasy called Hypnoia (a very sexy Erika Winters) dancing behind a screen that flashed only her writhing silhouette to the audience.

As the drama unfolded in crisp and often very funny beats, I began noticing the lack of music. I turned to Cinelli and whispered, “Isn’t this supposed to be a musical?” She whispered back, “I thought so.”

I began looking at the playbill given to me at the box office, a large, slick pamphlet in shades of hot pink and gold that featured the Picasso-like depiction of a woman’s face on the cover. A man across the aisle, whom we later discovered was Kevan Jenson, producer of the play we were seeing, noticed my confusion. He came to me and whispered, “You’re in the wrong theater.”

There are occasions in the tides of man when he is forced to admit total defeat. Think of a tearful Gen. “Skinny” Wainwright surrendering the Philippines to the Japanese in the early days of World War II, and a somber Robert E. Lee relinquishing his saber to Ulysses S. Grant in the Civil War. And think of a man in a theater suddenly realizing his woman was right and he’s seeing the wrong play.

My ego collapsed, my testosterone froze and my id fled, symptoms not dissimilar to kidney failure or a sudden drop in blood pressure. To apply yet another metaphor, Cinelli looked at me the way Joe Louis must have looked down at Max Schmeling after he had pounded him to the canvas. It was with a twitch of triumph.

We sat through the rest of the play, a smartly written satire called “Shrinks” by Maria Jenson that was fraught with angst, alienation, adjustment disorders and erotic fantasies. It was playing at the Hudson Backstage Theatre, as opposed to the Hudson Main Stage next door where “The Wild Party” was being performed without us.

I had been humbled by my own arrogance in a display of defectiveness too vast to conceal. Had I lived in a culture that demanded more serious acts of atonement than an apology, my defeat might have called for hara-kiri.

We emerged from my mistake with me dragging along like a beaten dog. When we cleared the lobby, I surrendered my saber by admitting that I had, er, um, uh, chosen the wrong door and would have probably chosen the wrong door in the fable about the lady and the tiger and been eaten by the tiger instead of loved by the lady.

The ride home was very quiet.

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Al Martinez’s column appears Mondays and Fridays. He can be reached at al.martinez@latimes.com.