Even if you didn’t join a debate club in high school, you’re likely to be viscerally familiar with the type of overachiever onstage in Trophy Boys — hypercompetitive, cutthroat, and prone to wrapping the worst intentions in the bubble wrap of the right language. And as a few Proustian puffs of a spray bottle onstage will remind you, they do tend to smell like Axe body spray. In the playwright Emmanuelle Mattana’s drama, she dresses in mop-haired drag to play the star in a quartet of debaters at a boys’ school who’ve learned they can talk their way through anything but then face a challenge that ties them in knots: getting assigned to argue that “feminism has failed women” in a championship debate against their rivals at an all-girls school. Can these “good boys,” as Mattana refers to them with very intentional air quotes in her script, take down women without making themselves look bad?
Of course they can, both in their competition and, as Mattana argues with a former debater’s combination of conviction and heavy-handedness, in life. Mattana’s character, Owen, a particularly slick operator, immediately suggests a cleverly bloodless, semantic argument about the definition of feminism — frame it as white and middle class, he says, then claim that it’s failed by not being intersectional. “We believe feminism has failed women from the perspective that we are actually more feminist than the feminists,” he announces with self-satisfaction. His teammates agree, mostly, but trip over themselves when they actually have to define what feminism is. It’s bad that women are told they need to wear high heels, one suggests. It sucks that my mom spent all her time at work as a businesswoman and not at home with me, adds another. Feminism is teaching girls to be bitter and hate all men, bemoans another. “And I love women!” he adds constantly, as a knee-jerk defense.
The insight that if you scratch the surface of a male feminist you’re likely to reveal a reactionary isn’t all that cutting — you do feel as if Owen should chide his classmates for enacting such an obvious trope — but Mattana and her director, Danya Taymor, get comedic mileage out of these boys’ absurdly cozy obliviousness. Central to Trophy Boys’s conceit is Mattana’s insistence that all the parts be played by female, gender-nonconforming, and nonbinary performers (and, with another director, staged it thus to success in Australia). The ensemble, through drag, is meant to send up the postures of masculinity. It’s a sort of defamiliarization, seeing the kinds of preening and peacocking you expect from teen boys transferred onto other bodies. Louisa Jacobson, seemingly thrilled to be released from her Gilded Age corset, plays Jared, the handsome golden boy of the bunch, with the jutted chin and limpid drawl of a guy who would absolutely corner you to play a terrible song on the guitar (he is, of course, the one who keeps saying he loves women). But Mattana, in writing and performance, often aims at easy targets. As the tightly wound Owen, she opts for an infantile rage, throwing tantrums that start off funny, though there are diminishing returns to the number of times you can angrily crawl onto a desk in short shorts. Her portraits of the other two boys also tend broad: Owen’s beta-ish friend, David (Terry Hu), has the familiar resentments of a kid who may have spent too much time on Reddit, and Jared’s bro-y bestie, Scott (Esco Jouléy, great in the more daring gender examination of Wolf Play), is saddled with jokes about how he’s not-so-secretly gay. Asked to name a movie that moved him, he answers Brokeback Mountain, a line that’s fully 20 years stale.
The difficulty here may be that Trophy Boys has made it to America to discover that other plays have already lapped it. It’s hard to watch it and, for instance, not think about John Proctor Is the Villain, also directed by Taymor. (The tell is that both have dance breaks.) That play, by Kimberly Belflower, tackles so many of the same topics with more finesse and, crucially, empathy for its characters. I don’t mean that she lets them off the hook. But if the girls are center stage there, the play is still interested in understanding the context that tells high-school boys to grab what they want. Belflower has a sociological interest in a particular location and setting — rural Georgia in the midst of the Me Too movement — whereas Mattana presents generalities. Her boys’ school is meant to be a snobby every-private-school and her characters are rough sketches of every boy.
Trophy Boys, according to Mattana’s notes in her script, is meant to make its way from caricature to naturalism — midway through the play’s one act, she reveals a secret about something bad one of the boys may have done — but it’s not a tonal shift that she and Taymor successfully effect. Even by the end of the play, I still felt as if I were watching paper characters conjured for the sake of a clean argument in a debate, in the way that you do high-school physics calculations without accounting for air resistance. Owen, for one, announces early on that he’s on an academic scholarship and then later reveals that he doesn’t even need the money (his grandparents are commuting in from the Hamptons to watch), he just likes winning. Sure, that’s a good punchline, but it’s also a rug pull that keeps the audience from actually knowing his and the other boys’ motivations. If Mattana wants to make the argument that gender is a socially taught thing, as she does in the program notes, then it’s worth taking a closer look at how the teaching actually happens. What is it about privilege that makes these kids cling to it so tightly? Is it class anxiety? What they see on social media? Porn? (Aside from that one dance break, Trophy Boys is remarkably uninterested in how it feels to be a teenager with a raging sex drive.) Otherwise, we’re at a simpler conclusion, of the kind Owen might recognize as contra the intended point: Boys are just like that.
On the opposite extreme of Trophy Boys, it’s also possible to overload a play with too much context, which is what happens to the beleaguered characters in Abby Rosebrock’s Lowcountry. Set in South Carolina, where Rosebrock is from, the play comes freighted with an insistent awareness of the systems and structures that hold its two characters down and only coincidentally bring them together. David (Babak Tafti, neurotic and wiry in a way that becomes charming) is a single father trying to win visitation rights to his son, living in an apartment sponsored by a controlling benefactor (Keith Kupferer, whose sonorous voice makes the character an overbearing presence, even when heard primarily over the phone) and preparing to meet a Tinder date to whom he’s clearly lying about more than a few of his life circumstances. Tally (Jodi Balfour, as wary as a cat hit by a spritz of water) is that date, a former aspiring actress who’s been yanked from Los Angeles back to the place where she grew up so she can help her dad move. She spouts strident but confused opinions about the military-industrial complex and, while insisting she’ll leave town as soon as she can, expresses a frank interest in hooking up with David.
At its best, Lowcountry is a grimy and charged encounter between two lonely people over the course of a muggy evening — there’s a bit of Frankie and Johnny to it, twisted and deformed by more frayed circumstances. Though the two have an immediate chemistry (and director Jo Bonney does conjure a real spark with Balfour and Tafti’s body language), David insists he can’t have sex with Tally because he’s in a court-ordered recovery program and his ability to see his son depends on his compliance. You, as she does, may soon guess he has a sexual infraction in his past, the details of which Rosebrock parcels out slowly, challenging the goodwill the audience may have immediately attributed to David via Tafti’s innate warmth. If Trophy Boys asks what men can get away with, Lowcountry reverses the inquiry: Where’s the outer boundary of what you can forgive?
Tally herself, however, seems to only get more interested in David the more he reveals about himself. That’s convenient for the play, considering that Rosebrock has to keep her in the room for it to keep going, but it makes the psychology tricky to decipher. Balfour throws herself into the tangle of strong stances written for Tally — among them an underexplained insistence that her mother’s hatred of Bill Clinton was the reason for her death — but they add up to an unstable characterization, not just because she is, at times, providing contradictory information about herself. Some of that is intentional, because, like David, she’s lying about a few crucial things. Other vagaries make it seem as if Rosebrock hasn’t yet decided all the details about Tally and is simply using her as a delivery system for the necessary table-setting: She’s on hand to rant about the cruelties of the American judicial system or the hypocrisy of churchgoing Southerners and their accompanying xenophobia. All of it is solid context for the world that these two characters occupy, but most of it is told and not felt.
As their mismatched date barrels onward, David starts to worry Tally is making a show of her own empathy by being interested in him, and you start to worry that Rosebrock, as a playwright, is doing the same. It’s not that Tally and David’s charged cross-interrogation of each other isn’t a compelling situation, but Rosebrock keeps commenting on it from the outside — especially via Tally’s monologues that eddy like Substack posts — instead of enacting it. Only in the play’s last few minutes does the nasty and brutish world that Tally is bewailing suddenly claw its way into the apartment where she and David are on that date. The sudden turn of events is jarring, and for a few minutes I was weighing whether I admired Rosebrock’s daring for simply thrusting her characters into extrema. But then she bottles the thing up neatly with another few swivels of plot. The intention, maybe, is to provide a flicker of hope for these two characters and for the audience. But I think we can tolerate sitting longer in the mess instead of in just the description of it.
Trophy Boys is at MCC Theater through July 27.
Lowcountry is at the Atlantic Theater Company through July 13.