Somewhere, underneath the gay male clichés, the too-broad focus, and the tired humor, a good play is buried within the bathhouse confines of Slap and Tickle, a new play making its world premiere as part of Bailiwick's 'Out All Year' gay pride series. The fact that Slap and Tickle is debuting professionally bodes well: there's still time to whip this creaky piece into some kind of shape before it goes anywhere else.

Slap and Tickle was 'inspired' by a series of interviews the playwright, David Parr, conducted with gay men about their sexual experiences. It's great that Parr has assembled a fairly diverse cross section regarding ages and sexual tastes. It's not so great that no men of color are included in his focus. Parr then sets his monologues, showcasing the men's experiences with drag, bathhouse sex, monogamy, barebacking, the rise of the Internet in gay connections, sex in bars, self-image, and more, inside the confines of a west side New York City bathhouse.

Parr's first mistake is making his focus encompass too much. One cannot detail the gay male experience, if there is such a thing, in 90 minutes. He would have been better off focusing on the bathhouse experience: its history, why men go there, why women don't, what needs it fills, what needs it doesn't, how a place such as this filters into the experience of couples. There's a wealth of material here to be mined without diffusing it by including Internet sex, backroom sex, drag queens, and so on. His next mistake is including a bathhouse employee who explains who each character is on stage before the character begins speaking. Not only is the character played (by Michael Hampton) with ham-handed overacting, he's superfluous. We don't need the extraneous information about the character's likes outside the sex club; we don't even need age and occupation. A good playwright, a good director, and a good actor could have made the characters unique through language, gesture, and attitude, without having to rely on annoying offstage commentary.

Slap and Tickle is supposed to be a comedy, but most of the jokes fell flat, as evidenced by the silence after some of the 'jokes.' Perhaps the show would have been funnier if it worked harder to unearth humor that was fresher and more original instead of relying on tired gayspeak such as calling each other by feminine names, having one character wear pearls, having another provide us with a lexicon of terms most gay men are more than familiar with (who needs a cock ring defined?). Although I saw the final preview before opening, it also seemed some of the actors had a long way to go before they had their lines down pat.

Parr needs to sharpen his focus, provide some dramatic tension, have the confidence to let his characters define themselves, and look for more originality before he has a play he can truly be 'proud' of.