Theatre in Review: Trophy Boys (MCC Theater)

	Emmanuelle Mattana. Photo: Photo: Valerie Terranova

"What are we pretending to be experts on today?" That's the question before the title characters of Emmanuelle Mattana's often delightfully barbed new play. Members of the debate team from a private school for overprivileged boys, they positively preen in the expectation of success against their sister institution. It is senior year, and with a winning record behind them, they plan to go out in a blaze of glory. The only downside? "My girlfriend will be so mad if we beat her again," one of them complains.

From the start of Trophy Boys, the stage is set for satire, courtesy of Matt Saunders' classroom set, decorated with posters touting such virtues as compassion, hard work, and respect, plus portraits of, among others, Margaret Thatcher, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Frida Kahlo, Yoko Ono, and Gloria Steinem. "This is the perfect debate prep room," one youth notes. "I am at my most inspired when surrounded by inspiring women." Imagine their horror, then, when they learn the position they are expected to defend: "That feminism has failed women -- Affirmative. "The stunned silence with which this no-win proposition is greeted is one of the funniest things in Danya Taymor's production.

Trophy Boys is the latest entry in the new genre of classroom drama. Such plays, unfolding in high school or college settings, feature largely female (or nonbinary) casts, playing characters wrestling with issues of identity, agency, friendship, sex, and power. Jocelyn Bioh got the ball rolling in 2018 with Schoolgirls; Or, the African Mean Girls Play. But recent seasons have many more contenders, including Flex, How to Defend Yourself, All-Nighter, and the queen of them all, John Proctor is the Villain. Cynics might think young playwrights, told to write what they know, have only their academic experiences on which to draw. Others might fear we are entering an era of YA theatre, which fetishizes adolescents and their problems. (This is a charge that might stick.) The truth, however, is that all these plays have been pretty darned good. Trophy Boys isn't quite on the same level, but Mattana, who also stars, has a wicked eye for her characters' increasingly elastic attitudes as they try to bluff their way out of an impossible situation, their self-images intact.

With only thirty minutes until the debate, Owen, arguably the most terrifying of the quartet, immediately seizes control; as he notes, he has bailed them out before with his knowledge of such abstruse subjects as "the complexities of Pyongyang's internal power struggle," "the ethics of AI in sex dolls," and "all the football players with charges of assault." Swinging for the fences, he advances the argument that feminism is a flop because it isn't intersectional enough. When that fails to fly, he suggests an even more brazen tactic, forfeiting the debate because "we stand in solidarity with our female and non-binary peers." It's putting it mildly that this gets a frosty reception from his award-hungry friends.

For the first half of its brief running time, Trophy Boys has endless fun putting its characters through all sorts of mental and moral gymnastics. The cast could hardly be bettered. Mattana appears as Owen, who, at seventeen, already has an eye on the White House; an Olympic-level virtue signaler, he is deeply alarmed at the idea that, decades hence, a video of the debate might surface, torpedoing his chances for high office. Terry Hu makes a solid antagonist as David, the disrespected debate team advisor, an expert at shooting down the others' unimpressive trial balloons. Going as far as anyone can get from The Gilded Age, Louisa Jacobson is Jared, the group's "artist," whose argument, that too many feminists are off-puttingly angry (like Greta Thunberg on climate change), gets shut down pronto. Esco Jouley does remarkably well with the role of Scott, who figures in a murky, underwritten gay subplot; his character's desperate phone call to his lawyer father reveals volumes about how these kids see themselves and their place in the world.

Scott reaches out to his dad when Owen, breaking the rules of debate prep, opens his laptop and discovers, via Instagram, a statement accusing a team member of sexually assaulting a girl from the opposing school. At first, as everyone frantically denies the charge, this seems like a neat twist that pushes the play into thriller territory. (The idea is floated that the post is disinformation designed to mess with their minds.) In reality, however, Mattana ends up in a corner, having to make good on the accusation. This involves a past incident involving all four characters, which everyone has conveniently forgotten until the plot requires their memories to be jogged. The rest is speechmaking as Trophy Boys busies itself with rendering judgments and offering lectures.

Mattana commits other rookie errors. The irony of Jared's claim, "I love women," palls after the first twenty or so iterations. There's a weak attempt at spoofing Bill Clinton's notorious evasion, "I did not have sex with that woman." (Would kids this age even know about that?) And until I consulted the script, I had no idea that Scott, who cops to being gay, and another character are mutually hot for each other.

Still, this is the sort of promising first play for which MCC exists, and the theatre has given it a first-class showcase. Taymor's director is taut and consistently well-observed, managing the tonal transition about as well as anyone could. If the script calls for a group freakout set to music, just like the one in John Proctor is the Villain, at least she knows how to pull it off. (Still, the similarity shows.) Cha See blends normal classroom lighting with saturated colors and mirror ball effects during this sequence, and some sinister shadow looks near the play's climax. Fan Zhang's sound design is solid, although the preshow playlist that includes "Dirty Little Secret" by the All-American Rejects and Robin Thicke's "Blurred Lines" is oddly suggestive of an earlier time frame. Costume designer Marion Talan de la Rosa has captured the look of prep-school uniformity, nevertheless giving each character an individual profile.

If Trophy Boys is ultimately undone by the need to preach its themes rather than dramatize them, it nevertheless showcases Mattana's sharp wit and uncompromising point of view. It also ends on an appropriately bruising note as the young men gin up an array of legalistic arguments that, alas, may very well protect them from the consequences of their actions. Unsettled as they are at being called out on the Internet, they are eerily primed for success. "Go out there and make something up," Owen says. "That's what we've been learning to do this whole time anyway." Look at the world around you and you'll see just what he means. --David Barbour