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‘Why Are Men Like This?,’ Ask Trophy Boys and Lowcountry
Two plays ask what they get away with and whether to forgive them.
The insight that if you scratch the surface of a male feminist you’re likely to reveal a reactionary isn’t all that cutting—you do feel as if Owen should chide his classmates for enacting such an obvious trope—but Mattana and her director, Danya Taymor, do get comedic mileage out of these boys’ absurdly cozy obliviousness. Her portraits of the other two boys also tend broad: Owen’s beta-ish friend David (Terry Hu) has the familiar resentments of a kid who may have spent too much time on Reddit, and Jared’s bro-y bestie Scott (Esco Jouléy, great in the more daring gender examination of Wolf Play) is saddled with jokes about he’s not so secretly gay. David (Babak Tafti, neurotic and wiry in a way that becomes charming) is a single father trying to win visitation rights to his son, living in an apartment sponsored by a controlling benefactor (Keith Kupferer, whose sonorous voice makes the character an overbearing presence, even when heard primarily over the phone) and preparing to meet a Tinder date to whom he’s clearly lying about more than a few of his life circumstances.
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