WE'RE JUST LIKE THE `CAVEMAN'.

Byline: Reed Johnson Theater Critic

Rob Becker's ``Defending the Caveman'' is still your basic ``boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy clubs girl over the head and drags her into a cave'' type story. Why mess with success, after all, when you've already got the longest-running one-man play in Broadway history?

In the course of performing his solo show to sellout crowds over the past eight years, Becker hasn't changed his material much. He's still offering adroit, good-humored observations on the war between the sexes, still schlepping around stages in old jeans and a T-shirt, still fetching knowing laughs from his audience simply by feigning slack-jawed incomprehension over how women can manage to do two things at once, like talk about relationships and read the newspaper.

``Defending the Caveman,'' which opened a two-week run at the Pantages in Hollywood Tuesday night, is the show that dares to ask the eternal question: Why can't a woman be more like her beer-drinking, underwear-strewing, conversationally challenged mate? Or, conversely, why can't men be more like their bathroom-scrubbing, feelings-sharing, shop-till-they-drop feminine counterparts?

Becker's answer (better sit down for this one): We're different. Not just different sexes, mind you, but virtually different cultures, with different languages to boot. Women express their feelings more directly than men, for example by telling a dear, old friend, ``You're one of my dearest and oldest friends.''

A man may communicate identical sentiments to his male best friend, Becker says, only in using a slightly different syntax. Such as: ``Sill driving that piece of (junk)?''

The gospel Becker has been preaching since 1991 is that men are hunters, single-mindedly locked in on their enemy, their next meal, the big hockey game on TV, or the means of achieving maximum sexual pleasure with minimal effort. Women, by contrast, are gatherers, forever squirreling away bright-colored bits of new spring clothing, gossip and other useful stuff. We've been miscommunicating for 10,000 years, Becker says. Can't we all just get along?

It's a simple message but not a stupid one. It's hopeful - at least the way Becker delivers it, with his non-threatening manner and unassuming, couch-potato looks. He's kept the same bare-bones set and props - a spear and cartoonish versions of a TV set and an easy chair, plus a pair of oversized ``cave paintings'' - and he leads off the show with an amusing montage of home movies performed by himself and his wife Erin.

Basically a glorified comic monologue with sound and light cues, ``Defending the Caveman'' still works, and it still goes on just a bit too long. Yet, five years after first seeing this show in Chicago, I had the same perception that Becker's gentle rib-nudging is far preferable to all those staged screaming matches between male and female adversaries on the radio and TV chat shows.

It's not hard to see why therapists and marriage counselors have sent patients to see ``Defending the Caveman.'' With so much of pop culture fostering ugly, mutually degrading ideas about male-female relations, it's a relief when someone comes along and suggests that a truce may be possible. Rob Becker speaks softly but carries a big spear.

THE FACTS

What: ``Defending the Caveman.''

Where: Pantages Theatre, 6233 Hollywood Blvd., Hollywood.

When: Through Oct. 24. Performances at 8 p.m. Tuesdays through Fridays, 5 and 8 p.m. Saturdays, 3 and 7 p.m. Sundays.

Tickets: $27.50-$44.50. Call [phone].

Our rating: Three stars.

CAPTION(S):

Photo

Photo: Cavemen are from Mars, cavewomen are from ... you guessed it ... in Rob Becker's ``Defending the Caveman,'' at the Pantages Theatre.