Interludes

THE HANGOVER REPORT – Young Jean Lee’s STRAIGHT WHITE MEN is a precise, deeply sympathetic portrait of a certain demographic

• By drediman
• July 24, 2018
• No Comments

Stephen Payne, Josh Charles, Armie Hammer, and Paul Schneider in Second Stage Theater’s production of “Straight White Men” by Young Jean Lee at the Hayes Theatre.

Second Stage Theatre has another winner on its hands with its Broadway mounting of Young Jean Lee’s Straight White Men, which opened last night at the Hayes Theatre (its other excellent currently-running production is Tracy Letts’ Mary Page Marlowe). When it was first announced that the play was chosen to be the second offering to inhabit the theater company’s brand new home on the Great White Way, I was skeptical. I had seen the play in its previous incarnation at the Public Theater a number of years back and remembered admiring but not really being taken by Ms. Lee’s gently loving satire about, you got it, straight white men.

Well, seeing the play again, I was very moved. What’s changed? Straight White Men, which depicts a Christmas gathering of three brothers and their father and is deliberately directed by Steppenwolf Theatre Company artistic director Anna D. Shapiro (Ms. Lee herself directed her play’s previous iterations) now feels coolly, even unnervingly distancing. Although it continues to be a sensitive view of a certain demographic, I found the current production’s objective but subtly layered treatment to be penetrating and unsettling.  I’m sure this has something to do with the play’s new framing device – the show is now told through the lens of a pair of observant gender fluid narrators.

Straight White Men is an actor’s dream. The characters are playful and convincingly three-dimensional, yet each are written to be ultimately finite. It’s a fine line that the cast at the Hayes – comprised of Stephen Payne, Josh Charles, Armie Hammer, and Paul Schneider – masterfully walks. Only the character of Matt (played by Mr. Schneider), the oldest brother, along with its patiently onlooking archangels, feel poised to break the mold. With her precise, deeply sympathetic portrait (literally), Ms. Lee has done the same, by being the first Asian American woman playwright to be produced on Broadway.

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED

STRAIGHT WHITE MEN
Broadway, Play
Second Stage Theater at the Hayes Theatre
1 hour, 30 minutes (without an intermission)
Through September 9