Review: Straight White Men at Studio Theatre
Straight White Men is a timely, accessible examination of expectation and privilege
Much ado was made earlier this year about CBS premiering what could accurately be called its “Season of the White Guy.” A few months after the #OscarsSoWhite hubbub, after Hollywood convened emergency diversity panels and launched corrective initiatives, after all the hand-wringing and soul-searching about inclusion, America’s most-watched TV network revealed three new dramas and three new sitcoms all revolving around straight, white men. The network was apologetic about the lack of diversity, but the message was unmistakable: Empire can rule the schoolyard if it wants, flaunting its blackness, gayness and female empowerment, but CBS was swinging hard in the other direction.
It’s a shift that might have foretold this election. In the year of Black Lives Matter and Gold Star families who happen to be Muslim immigrants, the keys of the White House were handed to two (very) straight, (very) white guys. Given the current nationwide white-geist, Studio Theatre should be applauded for their prescience in bringing Young Jean Lee’s ballsy comedy Straight White Men (
) to the capital. And give credit to Lee for getting there well ahead of CBS’s MacGyver reboot, or at least before somebody turned American Psycho into a musical.
An artist who’s fearless in tackling touchy subjects, Lee delivers in one tight 85-minute play a surgical dissection of the rites and rights of the straight white male. Helmed by director Shana Cooper, this warmly accessible production doesn’t disappoint in eliciting laughs and sparking insight, with its story of three adult sons at home for what could be a testy Christmas with their widower father. It’s the real world, not a CBS comedy, yet set designer Andrew Boyce’s cushiony family room, and Ji-Youn Chang’s well-tuned lighting cleverly suggest the cozy familiarity of a three-camera sitcom. It helps ease the audience into the squirming discomfort that lies ahead. Youngest brother Drew (Avery Clark), a moderately successful academic and novelist, and middle brother Jake (Bruch Reed), a prodigiously successful banker, both arrive home bearing their own disappointments. However, the Butterball-sized failure on the family’s menu this year is that eldest brother Matt (Michael Tisdale), has moved back in with dad Ed (Michael Winters), and seems not remotely prepared to step up, claim the many gifts he was born with, and move forward with his life.
Ed and the boys’ dearly departed mother raised their sons to be conscious of, even critical of, their advantages as members of a historically unoppressed race. They were aware enough as parents to repurpose the family Monopoly board and pieces to play a self-invented game called Privilege, where instead of picking a Chance or Community Chest card, players can draw Excuses or Denial. No one in the family expected that Matt, revered by his brothers and father as the ideal idealist, would sell himself out for an empty, high-paying corporate job. But to see him retreat so completely into settling for nothing — shuffling around the house in mom’s old apron, volunteering as a copy boy for some social justice-minded nonprofit — stirs a gnawing unease in all the men. In true holiday comedy style, it explodes to the surface right after the requisite heartwarming, dance-around-to-a-pop-hit family bonding interlude.
Director Cooper has described the play as a response to Lee’s epiphany that, “in our society, we actually despise being a loser more than we despise being, say, a misogynistic jerk.” In Matt, they’ve given us quite a loser to drive home the point. Shaggy-haired and shaky-voiced, dutifully baking pies and vacuuming up messes, Matt appears the soul of misery, bereft of the limitless potential that drove the family’s expectations of him so sky-high. Tisdale leans heavily into Matt’s malaise, written into a corner by a script that demands he turn wounded fecklessness into a trait riveting enough to prompt closer inspection. While he finds the cringing pain at the center of poor, melting Matt, he evinces little of the wonder-boy aura that his family, especially youngest bro Drew, projects on him.
Part of Lee’s point here is to illustrate the debilitating pressure of being expected to win, but Matt is so profound a sad-sack, one could easily lose their patience with him well before his cheerfully enabling dad does. The guy’s not a stalled classic up on blocks — he’s a hollowed shell of a car going nowhere. Trying to get him up and running seems a fool’s errand, even for his loving family.
Clark struggles not to overplay baby brother Drew’s urgent need to see Matt become the man he’s always looked up to. Winters and Reed fare better as two versions of the alpha male, one the supportive patriarch, the other a self-described rich prick, who’d rather turn away in resignation or horror from the sight of Matt failing. Reed nails the comedy and pathos of his part, strongly registering every aspect of privilege he gladly accepts as a product of the way things work in this world.
Opening in the same week America elected Donald Trump, Straight White Men slots in perfectly to what reasonably could be called the Year of the Straight White Male. That is, if we could name any other year in American history that didn’t uplift or uphold the privileged status of hetero white dudes.
Straight White Men runs to Dec. 18. Studio Theatre, 14th & P Streets NW. Tickets are $20 to $97. Call 202-332-3300 or visit studiotheatre.org.
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