Everyday Uses for Sight, Nos 3 & 7, The Pit, Barbican, London

Sex and the single boy

"No one is going to look at you,'' nanny used to say. "No one is interested in you. You are not interesting.'' In trying to stamp out vanity, nanny crushed who knows how many fragile little psyches, but sometimes her disappearance is regretted. The times, for instance, when one sees something like Everyday Uses for Sight.

I can't say, though, that I've ever seen anything quite like this. How often, after all, do you see (onstage or off) a middle-aged man talking about his childhood homosexual fantasies while manipulating jointed paper dolls of naked children and ogling a youth who in turn spies on the sex acts of dolls in a Wendy house. Dan Hurlin, who wrote and acts in these two autobiographical pieces, grew up in the New England house his great-great-grandfather built. Tall and lean, in white shirt and chinos, with close-cropped grey hair, he has the look and bearing of his rock-ribbed ancestors. But from his ears dangle golden hoops, and I do not think he wears red braces, like the fireman in the joke, to keep his trousers up.

Indeed, those semiotic suspenders do nothing to keep trousers from coming down – not Hurlin's but those of a young man who in the first piece, The Home of Bill and Sandy Kelly, watches through binoculars as the Kellys have cocktails, watch TV, and copulate. The last activity does not interest young Dan, though, as we see when a doll, also dressed like the two actors, is shown tiny Playboy pin-ups and expresses boredom and distaste. Dan's two passions are architecture and boys, which he combines at age 10 by getting his friends to help him build a clubhouse in 1950s ranch style, with conversation pit. If it gets really hot, he thinks, maybe the boys will take their shirts off, maybe their trousers, maybe.... Grown-up Dan gloats over little cut-outs of the children as he envisaged them, naked but holding builders' tools, and slides on to the floor, arm thrown over his head and eyes rolling as he recalls his youthful lust.

The Heart of the Andes has another Dan doll, one who studies the art books that were Hurlin's other childhood passion. The title refers to an enormous, highly detailed painting by the Hudson River artist Frederic Church that the public were told to study intently, through opera glasses. Dan shows us models of the paintings he tried to disappear into, then runs around in circles, and poses before a reproduction of Winslow Homer's Cracking the Whip, as one of the boys at play.

There's no explanation of the blind accordion player who wanders on and off. Did he appear in the first French art film little Dan saw? Now, though, he periodically echoes a more recent movie: "Hey, you lookin' at me?'' It's not just Hurlin's pederasty by proxy that appals as his glowing certainty that the audience will share his enthusiasm for wallowing in these feeble banalities. Not that he hasn't had encouragement: prim, forceful nannies may be an unknown species, but, judging by the list of Hurlin's awards, grants, and academic appointments, the nanny state is thriving in art-world America, where the highest goal is to be looked at all the time.

To 21 September (020-7638 8891)