Theatre in Review: Straight White Men (The Public Theater)

	Austin Pendleton, Gary Wilmes, Pete Simpson, and James Stanley. Photo: Julieta Cervantes

Okay, Public Theater, out with it: Where is Young Jean Lee and what have you done with her?

Clearly, she is being held hostage in an undisclosed location while an impostor is on the loose. The Young Jean Lee that we know and fear is a relentless provocateur, who, in Song of the Dragons Flying to Heaven, deployed a cast of Asian-American performers to deliver the vilest possible insults about Asian-Americans; who, in The Shipment, played bait-and-switch racial identity games with the audience; and who, in Lear, assembled the extended family of a certain Shakespearean king to take part in a very contemporary -- and profane -- conversation. I admittedly am not a big fan of these works, but they did show an original mind and a gift for theatricality. There's no way that the pallid domestic drama at the Public is the work of the same writer.

When it was announced that Lee's latest work was titled Straight White Men, it seemed reasonable to expect a scathing, take-no-prisoners portrait of mainstream American culture. Instead, the lights come up on a remarkably unimpressive family room (admittedly designed with wickedly accurate precision by David Evans Morris) somewhere in the Midwest. It is the home of Ed, a retired engineer, who is hosting Christmas for his three adult sons: Jake, a successful, but divorced, banker; Drew, an early-career novelist of some note; and Matt, who temps for a left-leaning not-for-profit and lives at home with Ed.

Jake, Drew, and Matt were raised by their mother -- Ed's late wife -- to be more politically aware and emotionally sensitive than the norm -- and Lee has some fun with this idea, especially when Jake and Drew settle down to play a doctored version of Monopoly, titled Privilege, which Drew calls "the game where you have fun by not having fun." The rules include an undervalued domestic labor bonus and excuse cards, which say, for example, "What I said wasn't sexist/racist/homophobic because I was joking. Pay fifty dollars to the Lesbian and Gay Community Services Center."

But satire isn't on the author's agenda. Despite some friction, and some of the goofy fooling around that seems to happen whenever families get together, this is a collection of decent men, each trying to be a good person in a less-than-ideal world. Then again, why does a dinner of Chinese food end with Matt softly crying?

The rest of Straight White Men follows the others as they try to tease out the source of Matt's sadness, which they discuss ad infinitum without reaching any especially interesting conclusions. Ed, noting that his son is weighed down by student loans, offers to pay them off, but Matt refuses. Drew, who is in therapy, thinks that a dose of the talking cure will help him to self-actualize. Jake thinks Matt should get out of the house. There is, however, the little matter of Matt's resume, which, for a man in his 30s, is stunningly unimpressive. This leads to a remarkably lame sequence in which, using role-playing techniques, Matt pretends to apply for a job with a foundation, with Ed pretending to be the head of human resources. This is as provocative as Straight White Men gets.

Then again, at least in that scene, Lee appears to be trying for something like drama. Otherwise, Straight White Men meanders through 90 minutes, its bland characters discussing bland problems in bland dialogue. In what passes for a climax, the discussion of Matt's ennui turns into an argument between Jake, who is disgusted at his position at the top of the social ladder, and Drew, who believes that concentrating on one's self-worth is the key to happiness. But these speeches are so secondhand that they have no sting. "My company's run almost entirely by white guys," says Jake, "and I do nothing about it. I make 'ironically' racist jokes. I give straight guys shit about 'acting gay.' I talk about which of our interns I want to fuck. As much as I'd like to bring someone other than a white guy to a client meeting, the clients don't want it, so I'd never do it. Together with my ex-wife, I'm raising our kids to be as white as possible, except for when their blackness makes them more appealing tokens." As delivered by the otherwise solid Gary Wilmes, this comes off as generic, low-level complaining from a generically conceived character. Even when the action briefly turns aggressively physical, Straight White Men never ignites into anything really compelling.

All four actors play well together -- you can easily imagine them as a family -- but they mostly struggle with the rather halting drama of the later scenes. Pete Simpson captures Drew's self-satisfaction without making him into a jerk, and he is reasonably amusing early on when he falls back on old family roles and tries to break Jake's concentration when the latter is playing a video game. Austin Pendleton is touching as their loving father, who is distressed to see conflict break out among his boys. (It's rather sweet when he produces four sets of pajamas, insisting that the boys honor an old family tradition of sitting around in sleepwear.) The best work comes from James Stanley's Matt, who manages to suggest his character's largely unexpressed soul sickness. The rest of the production, which was also directed by Lee, is assured, including Christopher Kuhl's lighting, Enver Chakartash's costumes, and Jamie McElhinney's sound.

Watching Straight White Men, it occurred to me that Lee was playing some kind of monstrous prank on the audience, essentially building a dull drama to make the point that people such as Ed and his sons are not worthy of our interest, even if they occupy a privileged place in society. Somehow, however, I don't think that building a play entirely out of banalities is the best way to go about it. (This is one of those plays where the last scene is so inconclusive that when the lights come up for the curtain call the audience is taken by surprise.) Whatever Lee's gifts may be -- and she has earned much acclaim for her earlier works -- the mechanics of creating distinct, believable characters caught in conflict seem beyond her abilities at this point. Straight White Men is death by vanilla.--David Barbour