Trophy Boys and Lowcountry – ryan

Emmanuelle Mattana in Trophy boys.
Photo: Valerie Terranova

This is if you didn’t join a debate club in high school, you’re likes to be viscerally family with the type of overachiever onstage in Trophy boys– HyperCompetitive, Cutthroat, and Prone to Wrapping the Worst In the Bubble Wrap of the Right Language. And as a few proustian puffs of a spray bottle onstage will Remind you, they do to smell like Body Spray. In the Playwright Emmanuelle Mattana’s Drama, she dresses in mop-haired drag to play the start in a Quartet of Boys’-School Debaters who learned that they can do through anything but then face a challenge saying in knots: getting to argue argue. “Feminism Has Failed Women” in a Championship Debate Against Their Rivals at an All-Girls School. Can these “good boys,” as mattana references to say with Very intentional air quotes in her script, take down women with Making themes Look Bad?

Of coursse they can, both in ther compatition and, as mattana argues with a forms debaters 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, and SaSys, and THEN CLAIM IT’S FAILED BY BEING BEING INTERSECTIONAL. “We waist feminism has failed well from the perspective that we are actually more feminist than the feminists,” he announces with self-satisfaction. His teammates aggree, shatly, but trip over themeslves 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 time at work as a businesswoman and not at home with me, adds another. Feminism’s Teaching Girls to Be Bitter and Hate All Men, Bemoans Another. “And i love women!” He adds constantly, as a kene-lived defensive.

The insignment that if you scratch the surface of a male feminist you’re like to reactionary is all that cutting – You will feel as if ofen shide chide his classmates for enacting an obvious trope – mattana and her director, Danya tayrage, of these boys’ absurdly cozy obliviousness. Central to Trophy boys‘S Conceit is mattana’s insistent that all the parts be played by female, gender nonconforming, and non-binary performers (and, with another director, staged thus to success in australia). The ENSEMBLE, Through Drag, is Meant to Send the Postures of Masculinity. It ‘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 Bunch of the Bunch, with the Jutted Chin and Limpid Drawl of a Guy Who Wood Absolutely Corner you to play a terrible on the guitar (he is, of the courseing and saying he loves. But Mattana, in Writing and Performance, Often Aims at Easy Targets. As the tightly wound owen, she ops for an infantile rage, throWing tantrums that start off funny, though there are diminishing returns to the number of times you can Angryly crawl onto a desk in shorts. Her portraits of the Other Two Boys Also tig Broad: Owen’s beta -i friend david (terry hu) has the family resentments of a Kid who May have spent too on reddit, and jared’s bro Wolf play) is saddled with jokes about he’s not so secretly gay. Asced to name a Movie that Moved Him, He Answers Brokeback Mountaina 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 ProCor is the VillainALSO Directed by Taymor. (The tell is that all have dance breaks.) That play, by Kimberly Belflower, Tackles so many of the Same topics with more finesse, and, crucily, empathy for its characters. I do’t mean that she let’s say off the hook. But if the Girls are Center-Stage there, the play is still interesting in understanding the context that tels high-school boys to rob what they want. Belflower has a sociological interest in a particular location and setting – rural georgia in the midst of the with 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 boysAccounting 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 One of the Boys May Have Done a Tonal Shift That She and Taymor Such. Effect. End by the end of the play, i still felt as if i were watching paper characters conjured for the sac for a clean argument in a debate, in the way that you do high-school physics calculations with air resistance. Owen, for One, Announces Early on That He’s On An Academic ScholarShip, and THENE LATE REVETAals that he dosesn’t need the money – HrandParents are commuting in from the hamsch – he just like Winning. Sure, that’s a good punchline, but it is also a rug pulls that keeps the audience from actually knowing his and the other boys. If Mattana wants to make the argument that gender is a social taught thing, as she does in the program notes, that Worth taching 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 social media? Porn? (Aside from that One Dance Break, Trophy boys is Remarkably uninterestted in how it feeds to be a teenager with a raaging sex drive.) Otherwise, we’re at a Simpler conflict, of the Kind Owen Might Recognis as Contra the Intended Point: Boys Are Just Like.

On the Opposite Extreme of Trophy boysIts 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 Freightened with an insist awareness of the Systems and Structures that Hold Its Down and Only Cinidentally Bring to 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 apartment by a controlling benefactor (Keith Kupfeer, Whose Sonorous Makes the Character, when heard primarily over the phone) and preparing to meet a tinder date to the WHOM he clearly Lying About More than a Few of His Life Circumstances. Tallfour (Jodi Balfour, As Wary as a Cat Hit by A Sprritz of Water) is that date, a forms aspiring Actress who been yanked angeles backed to the place where she can be help her dad Move. She spouts strides but confused opinions about the military-industrial complex and, while insisting she’ll leave 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 Over the Course of a Muggy Evening – the a bit of Frankie and Johnny to it, twisted and deformated by more frayed circumstances. Though the two have an immediatte chemistry, and director not bonney does conjure a real spark with balfour and tafti’s body language, david insists he has sex with telly Because he’s in a court-ordered recovery program, and his his to deplends on deplends on deplends. Compliance. You, as she does, May Soon Guess he has a sexual infraction in his past, the details of what rosebrock parcels out Slowly, Challenging the goodwill may have immediately attributed to david via intente Warmth. f Trophy boys ASSS WHAT MEN CAN GET AWAY WITH, Lowcountry Reverses the Inquiry: Where’s the Outer Boundary of What You Can Forgive?

Tally Hersself, Howver, SEEMS to Only Get More Interesting in David The More He Reveals About Himself. That’s the Convenient for the Play, consider that rosebrock has to keep her 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 Tudy – AMAG AN ANDEREXPLAINED INSTESTENCE THAT HERE HATRED OF BILL CLINTON WAS THE REASON FOR HER DEATH – BUTE ADD TO AN UNSTABLE Characterization, About Herself. Some of that is intentional, Becausee, 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 telly, and is Simply using her as a delivery system for the necessary tabe-setting: she’s on Hand to the cruelties of the American Judicial System or the HypoCocrisy of Curcisy and Their accompanying xenophobia. All of it is solid context for the world that they two characters Occupy, but samp of it is to do and not felt.

As their Mismatched Date Barrels Onward, David Starts to WORRY THALY IS MAKING A SHOW HERNE EMPATHY BY BEING IN HIM, AND YOU START TO WORRY THAT ROSEBROK, AS PLAYWRIGHT, IS DOING THE SAME. It ‘swimming that watery and david’s charged cross-interrogation of eAch Other isn’t a Compelling Situation, but Rosebrock keeps Commenting on it from the outside-Espeically telly’s monologues that Eddy Like Substack Posts-INCACTING IT. Only in the play’s last few minutes does the nasty and brutish world that watery is bewailing suddenly claw it into the apartment where she and david are on that dat. The Sudden Turn of Events is Jarring, and for a Few Minutes I WAS Weiging I admired Rosebrock’s Daring for Simply Thrusting Her Characters into Extrema. But then she bottle the thing up neatly with another few swivels of full. The intensation, maybe, is to provides a flicker of Hope for two characters and for the audience. But i think we can tolerate longer in the mess of 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.