Jonathan Raymond Popp
l.-r.: William Joseph Lutz, Brent Holmes and Stephen Montagna.
Korean American playwright Young Jean Lee is not ambiguous about the subject matter of her 2014 play, Straight White Men, or the purpose of the work. She sets out to examine various behaviors of cisgender white guys and how they either reinforce or refute the privilege that society has disproportionately rewarded to them, ever since white men of means set up that structure. With the emotional distance of an anthropologist, Lee puts a father and his three adult sons on display in their natural habitat, in the childhood home celebrating Christmas. It is a “safe,” private space for the family where, in addition to having permission to revert to their childhood roles, the men can be themselves, away from all judgment, save from one another. But to recenter the narrative, Lee’s play provides two People in Charge who curate the show for the audience. These guides are emphatically not straight white men. According to the script, their job is to demonstrate the concept of privilege to the audience and completely control the performance.
Kathie Rasmussen Women’s Theatre (KRASS) is presenting Straight White Men at the Bartell through Dec. 21. But under the direction of Suzan Kurry and the influence of a heavy-handed production concept, the play’s frame, its intention, its characters, and ultimately its impact is not clear.
Much of the play unfolds as a typical family drama. As three distinctly different brothers reunite at their father’s house, they revisit old rituals and check in with the widowed patriarch Ed (Joseph Lutz). Ed’s the kind of straight white guy who got a good job as an engineer, married his sweetheart, had children, made enough money to send his kids to college and retire comfortably. He ignored his own desires as he fulfilled his duties as husband and provider, and spent so little time actually raising his sons that he barely recognizes the stories they tell about their youth.
Jake (Brian Belz) is the ultra-masculine bully, eager to demonstrate his dominance through his physical strength, his financial success as a banker, and the relentless hazing of his younger brother Drew (Brent Holmes). He is the kind of straight white guy who uses his black ex-wife as a prop to demonstrate his progressive coolness but he actively perpetuates the system that crowns him king of the hill.
Drew is the baby of the family who overcame depression and a miserable childhood as the butt of every joke, only to become wildly successful as an author and academic. He is the only family member who’s unafraid to have feelings, but he also reverts to whining for attention.
And then there’s Matt (Stephen Montagna), the eldest son who had a promising start but failed to launch. A Harvard grad and perpetual doctoral candidate, Matt has dropped out of life. He lives with his father, cooking and cleaning and working a temp job for a social service organization. Not only does his failure frighten the rest of the family, his lack of ambition is mystifying and his emotional state is questioned. Alternately bursting into tears and insisting he’s fine, Matt becomes a project for each of the other family members to fix, over the course of the long weekend.
If these characters seem like stereotypes, they are supposed to be. Lee conducted extensive workshops with actors while developing the play to define “typical” straight white men, understand their fears and desires, and even accurately emulate their speech patterns, so she could put them onstage for our review.
The actors are convincing as a family when it comes to their communal in-jokes, family traditions, horseplay, nicknames and dance routines recalling teenage adventures. But the actors are only partially successful at imbuing the characters with an underlying familial love. Although Jake brags at one point that he’s charming and likable, Belz comes off as a creepy predator with a mean streak. His revelatory speech admitting to his own prejudice and misogyny sounds more like bragging than a confession. And as the fine upstanding sit-com dad of the 1950s, Lutz’s Ed feels perpetually stiff and clueless. As Matt, Stephen Montagna is an enigma — to himself, to his family and to the audience. As Drew, Holmes is the only one able to create real connection, and he is by far the easiest to empathize with — although that may not have been the playwright’s intent.
At the play’s end, Matt becomes the straight white man who is rejected by his own tribe. Refusing to reap any benefits from his privilege, he is paralyzed by guilt and fear of making the world a worse place, simply by living in it. And we are encouraged to feel sorry for Matt, when the play’s last image focuses on a Person in Charge, Shauntel Burzynski, hugging him as he sobs.
But this directing choice counters the message embedded in the script’s final stage directions; that he is ignored. Perhaps that is because “dropping out and giving up” isn’t an option for most people with tons of student loan debt and regular bills to pay. It’s actually the ultimate act of privilege to simply refuse to play a game that you can’t win by packing up your toys and going home.
This is not the only significant departure from the script that does a disservice to the story. As written, the pre-show music and initial audience experience is an important part of the play — a point that’s underlined in the first playwright’s note on future productions. Lee specifies that as the audience files in to take their seats the theater should be flooded with extremely loud hip-hop music by female rappers with sexually explicit lyrics. The People in Charge are instructed to field complaints about the sound levels, if they arise, but not to reduce the volume. They then explain in the pre-show speech that the music choice was made to intentionally make some audience members feel uncomfortable because it is outside their experience. This is a clever and easy illustration of privilege; creating an environment that feels welcome to some, but very unwelcome to others. Later in the speech (which the playwright notes should be kept intact as much as possible) one Person in Charge says they are here to “try something a little tricky. As foreign as they are to us, we’re gonna try to find some understanding for straight white men. That’s what we wish everyone would do for us.”
By contrast, on opening weekend audience members were greeted by two extremely friendly and chatty People in Charge, Shauntel Burzynski and D.J. Xayasouk, and escorted to our seats with requests to let them know if there is anything they can do to make the show more pleasant. Bouncy pop music plays softly in the background, and we were even encouraged to request a favorite song from the DJ (stage manager Carole Alt). When the People in Charge did address the audience, it was simply to introduce themselves, list their pronouns, and welcome us to the show.
In another departure, the People in Charge ad lib throughout scene changes, which they oversee, moving actors and furniture. Although both Burzynski and Xayasouk are personable, neither seems confident or comfortable during these interludes, weakening their credibility as the ones actually in control of the story.
The play also creaks under the weight of a stifling production concept. It is set up as an enormous game, with the People in Charge competing against each other from the corners of the playing space, using the straight white male cast members as pieces, and starting each of the scenes with lighted controllers. Amy C. May’s set and props design looks like a giant game board, complete with two blocks painted as enormous dice. Every prop is fashioned out of money, tokens, dice shakers, or boards from games like Monopoly and Scrabble.
This was no doubt inspired by the plot point involving the (now-deceased) mom of the family trying to teach her sons to be good people. She converts a Monopoly set into a game called Privilege, to call attention to the advantages that they enjoy as white males. Being aware of their position, she theorized, could help the boys correct imbalances and bias all around them. Based on the family’s behavior over the holiday visit, her efforts had wildly mixed results. In addition, casting the straight white men as pawns in a game that pits LGBTQ people of color against one another is antithetical to the entire exercise. Making the men into game pieces removes them from any responsibility for their own actions, which is really not the point of the play.
