Have you heard the one about the Hollywood Greedhead and the Hooker With The Heart Of Gold? Sure you have—who hasn’t? It’s one of America’s most popular romantic myths, post-Sexual Revolution savvy regarding The World’s Oldest Profession having done little to diminish its seductive allure.
Brock Forrester is a hunky call-boy with a cheerfully peripatetic attitude toward his life and The Life—or so he tells his customers. Alton Marshall is a big-shot film producer complete with constantly ringing telephone and celebrity names to drop. But Alton is no David Mamet/Arthur Kopit/David Hare/John Patrick Shanley/Jon Robin Baitz lalaland slimebag. For one thing, his real name is Alan Moscowitz and he’s got a liberal arts degree from the University of Chicago. For another, he has to be the most clean-mouthed Bigwig since the days of the Hays Office. Still, like most men who purchase their pleasures, however priggish they may be, he’s a control freak who takes sadistic delight in playing petty entice-and-decline games with his subordinates. Aaaah, but just as Alton’s ambitious drive leads Brock to Get His Act Together, so does Brock’s naive earthiness inspire Alton to Let It All Hang Out.
At one time, it could be argued that transferring the Same Old Sentimental Soap to a gay context in itself constituted an original, even radical, approach to the genre. But playwright David Gaard is experienced enough to know better. And while Power Strokes’ same-sex variation on the Pretty Woman formula might still make for hugs and hankie-wringing—not to mention increased business for stud-hustlers—in some parts of our country, within the already niche-marketed program of Bailiwick’s Gay Pride Series, it cannot help but come off as irredeemably threadbare.
In the respective roles of Brock and Alton, Daniel Rangel and Ron Guthrie struggle mightily to render these paper-doll personalities believable (the latter doubly handicapped by the overliterary diction imposed on him by the author). But by the final scene, when Brock declares “It won’t work! These things never do!”, to which Alton—of course—replies rhetorically, “Don’t they?”, we don’t care any more, having been asking that question ourselves since scene two.