Straight White Men

B-

Young Jean Lee's family drama with comic overtones was first presented at the Public Theater a few years ago. Its move to Second Stage’s Helen Hayes Theater, with a star-studded new cast, a new creative team and two new characters, marks the first time a female Asian-American playwright has been produced on Broadway. The performance gets off to a very bad start: the theater is filled with the sound of ear-splitting hip-hop accompnied by colored lights flashing on the tinsel curtain. Two non-binary “persons in charge” dressed in festive metallic costumes, trans woman Kate Bornstein and Native-American trans man Ty Defoe, step before the curtain to give a brief lecture on the need for greater acceptance of gender fluidity and diversity. They add that the music was deliberately intended to make most of the audience uncomfortable. The two appear briefly between scenes and at play’s end for no apparent reason. I do not think that their contribution to the play merits their inclusion. When the play proper begins, we are in the family room of a retired, widowed Midwestern engineer Ed (Stephen Payne; Of Mice and Men) whose 40-ish eldest son Matt (Paul Schneider; “Bright Star”) has moved back in with him. Matt’s two younger brothers. Jake (Josh Charles; The Antipodes, “The Good Wife”) and Drew (Armie Hammer; “Call Me by Your Name”), have come home for a family Christmas. Jake is a prosperous banker, recently divorced from his African-American wife. Drew is a successful author and college professor. Although Matt was the brightest and most idealistic of the three and had a Harvard education, he has never found his purpose in life, still has huge college debts, and is presently working in a temp job at a social service organization. The three brothers revert to adolescence with much competitive horseplay. They play a board game called “Privilege” that their late mother had adapted from a Monopoly set to teach them positive values. As they enjoy their Chinese takeout Christmas dinner, Ed relates that, unlike his sons, he always felt the course of his life was laid out for him with a clearly delineated path. Jake and Drew become upset when Matt suddenly begins weeping during dinner. While they deeply care for him, they feel that Matt’s lack of achievement is a betrayal of the advantages he has enjoyed. Their competing diagnoses of his problem and their misguided attempts to shape him up provide both humor and pathos. The play ends on an ambiguous note. The ensemble acting is terrific; while the actors look nothing alike, they show a real chemistry. Payne, a late replacement for Denis Arndt who in turn was a replacement for Tom Skerritt, looks uncannily like Skerritt. The scenic design by Todd Rosenthal (August: Osage County) is appropriately generic. Suttirat Larlarb’s (Of Mice and Men) costumes are spot-on, especially the Christmas pajamas. Faye Driscoll’s choreography and Thomas Schall’s fight direction add a lot to the production. Anna D. Shapiro (August: Osage County, This Is Our Youth) directs with assurance. The title promises too much; the characters are a very specific, atypical subset of straight white maledom. While the play offers much to enjoy, it does not go that deeply into the questions it raises and the ending provides no satisfactory resolution. Running time: 90 minutes; no intermission.

The Antipodes

C-

After being underwhelmed by Circle Mirror Transformation and angered by The Flick, I decided that Annie Baker was not a playwright I would ever appreciate. Then along came John, the first play of her Signature Theatre residency, which I thoroughly enjoyed. Now we have her second work for Signature, this strange piece that is essentially a fantasia on storytelling. I am beginning to think that John was a fluke, because I was once again disappointed. The set, by Laura Jellinek, is a conference room with grey carpet on the floor and walls, an enormous oval table surrounded by Aeron office chairs, a large oval light fixture overhead and a pile of colorful boxes of flavored soda water on the floor. The audience sits on the two long sides. Unfortunately, this configuration leads to at least three of the actors having their back to you for the entire play. When we arrive, a young man with a laptop is seated near one end of the table. He is soon joined by five men and a woman. Finally an older man, clearly the boss, arrives and sits at the head of the table. This is Sandy (Will Patton) who is in charge of the six writers around the table who are tasked with telling stories that will lead to the creation of an unspecified new project, perhaps a video game. Brian (Brian Miskell), the young man with the laptop, is there to transcribe their stories. Sandy emphasizes that anything goes in their stories, except for dwarves, elves and trolls. He induces them to tell about their first sexual experience, the worst thing that ever happened to them and their biggest regret. Dave (Josh Charles) and Danny M1 (Danny Mastrogiorno) dive right in. Adam (Phillip James Brannon) doesn’t have much to say until late in the play when he tells the longest, most fully developed story. Danny M2 (Danny McCarthy) has trouble getting into the spirit of things. Josh (Josh Hamilton) is troubled that he has yet to receive his ID badge or his paycheck. Eleanor (Emily Cass McDonnell) placidly knits most of the time. Sarah (Nicole Rodenburg), Sandy’s secretary with the affect of a Valley girl, pops in now and then to take lunch orders and announce the latest reason for Sandy’s absence. The passage of time is marked primarily by her changes of costume. Although storytelling is not part of her job, she tells one of the evening’s best tales. Some of their stories are raunchy, others gory and at least one, poetic. The stories that comprise most of the evening have no narrative arc that I could detect; nor do they really tell much about the characters who relate them. The relationships among the various writers go virtually unexplored. There are flashes of humor including a running joke about each writer having a different idea about how many kinds of stories there are. There’s a neat trick that I never figured out whereby food mysteriously appears on the table. What there is not is a cohesive plot or fully-developed characters. I suspect that the playwright had more fun coming up with ways to tease the audience than the audience has watching the play. Lila Neugebauer (The Wolves) directed. Running time: one hour 55 minutes; no intermission.