Jeffrey Sweet–Making the Scene

Sometimes, at the end of a show, I feel pulled in two directions — admiration and dismay.

Four recent shows made me feel this way. As the lights came up I found myself clapping fervently for the performances but feeling that the scripts that made those performances possible fell short as writing.

I was particularly taken by Emmanuelle Mattana’s performance as Owen, a high school boy preparing for a debate meet with his male teammates to argue the affirmative side of the question, “Feminism has failed American women.” Three of the four boys in Trophy Boys are played by women, a fourth by an actor named Esco Jouley who identifies as gender-nonconforming, and part of the conceit of the play is that this debate on gender between teenage boys is played by actors in drag. Mattana and her company (directed by Danya Taymor) are in high sketch comedy mode with the well-observed body language of adolescents torn between braggadocio and insecurity. Owen is a particularly interesting character because he is the most articulate and so his arias of rationalization and self-deception are the most amusingly ornate. As I applauded Mattana’s skillful and oddly charming performance, I wished that the writer had provided her with a sturdier play. And then I looked at the program and discovered that, in fact, she was the author of the play.

The play runs a little shy of ninety minutes, the length of the team’s allotted time for debate prep. My hunch is that, within a larger work, it would have registered as a tour de force scene, much as the live-texting meeting of the school board and parents in Eureka Day was the high point of that play. On its own, the back and forth between the boys and the spooning out of the confessions and revelations felt attenuated, as if Mattana were trying to get as much mileage as she could out of the set-up. That said, many of the passages, featuring bright young minds tying themselves into knots and confronting their own hypocrisy, had a smart satiric edge. I may be less than persuaded by the play as a whole, but Mattana is a writer I look forward to following, and she is an adept performer.

Abby Rosebrock established her ability to write compelling parts for women in Blue Ridge, which featured an incandescent performance of an unstable teacher on suspension by Marin Ireland. Rosebrock returns to the Atlantic Theater with Lowcountry, and again one of the leads is a woman radiating danger – Tally, played by Jody Balfour, has shown up for a blind date in the scuzzy apartment of a somewhat hapless sex offender named David (Batak Tafti) in the hopes of … well, that’s one of the matters that gradually is revealed as the plot unwinds. From the moment she enters David’s apartment, we sense she has an agenda and that, as she pursues it, she is inclined to taunt and tease him just for the fun of it. (More than once I was reminded of Amira Baraka’s Dutchman, though the play goes in a markedly different direction.) Unlike Blue Ridge, which I think deserved a longer run, Lowcountry feels self-consciously constructed. Despite the admirable work of Balfour and Tafti, which keeps the audience gripped for the bulk of their long two-person scene, the heavy hand of the playwright is always evident, and the revelations blurted out in high-pressure moments feel mechanical. Still, Blue Ridge was one hell of a play, and I will go to her next hoping for a return to form.

Angry Alan, by Penelope Skinner, concerns an initially likable but not overly bright guy named Roger who, in the wake of a divorce and the loss of a job, is primed to fall under the influence of an online influencer named Alan who preys on the resentment of men who feel they have been screwed. And, of course, they are being screwed again by the influencer, who monetizes their hostility by selling them spurious workshops and literature while reinforcing in them values that will encourage them to continue self-defeating behavior. Line by line, the piece serves Jon Krasinski well. His hapless charm makes us simultaneously root for him to pull out of his descent while (since, of course, we are smarter than he is) tsk-tsking at his gullibility. Though most of the piece is a monologue, there is a pointed scene between Roger and his teenage son (well played by Ryan Colone) which demonstrates the human cost of his buying into Alan’s misogynistic bullshit. The play gets the desired response out of the audience and Krasinski gets the hand at the end he deserves. But I left feeling that the piece somehow was too easy. I never for a second doubted that Roger was going to come to well-earned grief, and I think a better-conceived play might have explored the possibility that Roger wasn’t doomed to fail from the get-go.

Call Me Izzy by Jamie Wax is similar to Angry Alan in that, moment to moment, it serves its star well. The star, in this case, is Jean Smart. But it gives me pleasure to note that I returned to see Johanna Day, an actor I’ve admired for years, when she went on for Smart as Smart was recovering from an injury. Day also moved the audience to cheers by the end. I am sure that others who take on this part will meet a similar reception. Izzy is the product of years of Wax interviewing women isolated in rural poverty in the South with abusive partners. What makes Izzy special is that she has a talent for poetry. It is a talent she has to hide from her brutish husband, partially because his treatment of her is evident in her writing.

Now that I think of it, the experiences of seeing Smart and Day, though both rewarding, were distinct. Smart has created a vivid and much-loved public persona as acerbic stand-up comic Deborah Vance on the TV series Hacks, and, from time to time, one can’t help but remark how far from that character Izzy is, and how fully Smart inhabits her. Yes, I know, it’s called acting, and it’s the job. But I’m betting part of the appeal of the play for Smart is that it offers her the chance to play something so different from the role for which she is famous. Day has played a variety of roles in some of the best American plays of the past couple of decades without quite becoming the over-the-title star she deserves to be. This is another in her gallery of resilient characters, and she is less overtly ingratiating than Smart in the part. This isn’t a complaint, just an observation that the work can support two distinct and excellent performances.

Call Me Izzy is never less than interesting, but I get the feeling that we in the audience are expected to value Izzy more because she is an artist. I find this attitude often creeps into contemporary writing – the suggestion that people deserve better treatment if they are gifted. The unarticulated corollary is the disturbing suggestion that untalented people don’t deserve the same rights and considerations as those who are talented. (I don’t doubt this isn’t what was intended in creating the piece, but works don’t always get the reactions the creators intend.) The fact that Izzy is special paradoxically works against the piece. But I wouldn’t be surprised if I were the only person disturbed by this.

Incidentally, I notice that the male characters depicted either directly or by report in all four of these works are mostly assholes. They seem to be assholes because they are male. (Izzy’s poetry teacher makes a somewhat better impression, but that’s but one guy and we only learn of him by report from Izzy.) I can’t remember the last time I saw a new play that featured a major male character who wasn’t either a bastard or laughable. I must be overlooking something, yes?