‘Caveman’ author emergest to explain hands-off approach

Kevin Burke has performed “Defending the Caveman” so many times, it’s easy to forget he’s not the guy who wrote it.

After nearly eight years of having the show here in town, it was time to track down the guy who did.

Burke is back on his Fred Flintstone sofa, again performing the one-man comedy he has done more than 3,400 times, this time at The D.

But the full billing is “Rob Becker’s Defending the Caveman.” Becker, a stand-up comedian of the 1980s, wrote the comic monologue about men and women and performed it close to 5,000 times — making it the longest-running solo play on Broadway — after he launched it in 1991.

Then he disappeared.

Becker’s face is still in the show’s cartoon logo. But he severed ties completely in 2006, selling all rights to a firm called Theater Mogul, based in Iceland.

In fact, Becker is so far removed, he had to check with the producers to make sure he could talk to me. He says they were surprised he asked for permission, and equally surprised when he told them it was stated in the terms of sale.

But they actually get along fine, which is one reason Becker cut the cord. “There’s a lot of people who didn’t earn my trust,” he says. “I don’t give my trust very easily either. But once you earn it you get it, until you do something to break it.”

Still, Becker’s detachment is rare, especially in Las Vegas. John Bentham, the local producer of “Caveman,” has never talked to him either. Compare that to other “one-hit wonder” creators of cottage industries.

Stuart Ross, the creator of “Forever Plaid,” and Dan Goggin of “Nunsense,” both checked in on local rehearsals when those shows were here. And “Tony N’ Tina’s Wedding” restricted its Las Vegas rights to original director Larry Pelligrini visiting each quarter to brush up the local production.

In the same room at Bally’s last month, Al Samuels came to stage his co-creation “50 Shades! The Parody.”

Only “Menopause the Musical” creator Jeanie Linders recently followed Becker’s path and sold all rights to her show, but for opposite reasons: The sale followed years of acrimony and litigation.

But Becker? He says he was tired. The producers “had all the energy for it and I was going to basically retire it. That’s the mindset I was in when they bought it.”

By then, Becker had turned a stand-up act into a name brand.

The San Francisco-area native was part of the ’80s comedy boom, and played the Riviera’s Improv during the era that created many a TV star. “(H)e would do this trend proud: He belongs in a sitcom,” declared a Los Angeles Times review of his club act.

Hollywood didn’t seem to agree. But Becker had seen Lily Tomlin perform “The Search for Signs of Intelligent Life in the Universe.”

“Instead of random stand-up, she had created a theater piece. A story with an arc,” he says. “I was just in love with that. A way to take stand-up to another level. I saw you could affect people with comedy in a way that you couldn’t when you just do random jokes.”

He began to study playwriting to “prepare myself in case I ever got an idea like that,” he says. “When I got married and started doing this material about men and women, it seemed to me like the moment had arrived.”

Flash-forward about 5,000 performances, and a backstage Broadway visit from Michael Chiklis, who in early 1997 was between “The Commish” and “The Shield.”

“I think you should keep it going but with another actor,” Chiklis urged him. “I think you should let me play the role.”

Chiklis convinced him, “This is everybody’s show. That is exactly why the show resonates as it does.” Translating it into other languages also made Becker realize, “I had written something universal. It’s not really written like stand-up comedy.”

Becker says he has been “chipping away” at a sequel, “Cave Dad,” about “how mothers and fathers parent differently, and how boys and girls turn out differently.”

Even when he and his wife gave their daughter a hammer instead of a doll, “we came in one night and she was putting her hammer to bed. It didn’t matter what we did, the gender differences came out anyway.”

But progress on that one has been slow for the father of three. The keepers of “Caveman” hope to introduce script revisions at The D to prep for a possible 20th anniversary return to Broadway. Still, Becker remains hands off.

“I think some of the details, some of the examples, can definitely use updating,” he says. But again he adds, “It wouldn’t do me any good to go watch the show and try to make changes, because I don’t have the right to do that.”

“Kevin certainly is funny and certainly understands the show,” he says. “I would trust him to make changes in the show in a way that wouldn’t alter the intention of the show.”

Sounds like the two now share not only a cave, but custody of it as well.

Read more by Mike Weatherford at bestoflasvegas.com. Contact him at mweatherford@reviewjournal.com.