Review: Spread, a Play about the Laddies Who Lunch

A brightly colored poster in Mr. R’s high school classroom acronymically commands its students to THINK before they contribute to a conversation: Is what they’re about to say True? Helpful? Inspiring? Necessary? Kind?

The four ninth grade boys who spend most lunches sprawled across the desks in this classroom, trash-talking with gleeful abandon between bites of their seemingly endless stockpile of snacks, don’t seem to have taken this poster to heart. In Jesús I. Valles’s new play Spread, now making its world premiere at INTAR, fat-shaming disses and homophobic asides fire across the room like spitballs. They’re absolutely awful to each other and they’re also, in their misfiring attempts to build themselves into grown-up children, utterly lovable.

Well, maybe not utterly in the case of Andrew (Danny Gómez), the kind of ringleader you can’t stop hanging out with even though his jokes burrow deep beneath the skin. His comments about BO sting Jeffrey (Jaden Perez), and Jordan (Ishmael Gonzalez), despite playing along, suffers from Andrew’s relentless digs about his weight. He anxiously asks, “You guys think I look like Shrek forreal?” Andrew doubles down on the insult.

But Andrew has a unifying vision for a collaboratively prepared lunch of Texas prison spread, the sort of improvisational meal that inmates might make with crushed ramen, Slim Jims, Fritos, and hot water. If only the others will remember to bring their ingredients, it’s bound to be better than school lunch, which is part of the school-to-prison pipeline anyway. “Schools are training you for jail,” Andrew explains. “That’s why there’s no AC in the hallways, to get you to your cell faster.” He’s got a point.

And though Spread, in its shrewd commitment to observing teens in their natural habitat without commentary, avoids heavy-handedness, there’s a searing indictment of public education coursing through the play’s plumbing. In Valles’s swiftly orchestrated peeks into each kid’s home life, we see one of them raising a sibling while a single parent works long shifts. Another navigates domestic turbulence amidst a family member’s incarceration. Valles, in his complete characterizations, seems to recognize the complexity of each kid’s needs outside of the classroom in a way that the school system does not.

 Spread’s unspoken tragedy is that a kid like Jeffrey perceives his failure to focus on his biology textbook while his parents scream and throw things outside his bedroom door as a sign of his innate stupidity. No adult will tell him otherwise. (In the script’s sole miscalculation, the play’s lone grownup only shows up to deliver an unnecessarily surrealism-tinged monologue.) Plus, the script indicates that the play takes place in fall 2019. How much harder will it get for these high schoolers once quarantine hits?

Urgent undercurrents, yes, but Spread unfurls with a goofy gait and breezily light touch. Valles is precise in capturing the rhythms and distraction-driven tangents of adolescent banter. SpongeBob impressions and random arguments about whether butterflies have souls burst into their crosstalk with minimal context.

Under Tatyana-Marie Carlo’s punchily engaging direction, all four actors meet the challenge, persuasively passing as high school freshmen in all their stubborn messiness. There’s impressive verisimilitude in the staging, too—INTAR’s tiny blackbox often boasts the highest ratio of production value to square footage—through Rodrigo Escalante’s precisely rendered classroom set with pop-out features, which become parts of each boy’s bedroom. A horror movie scene with amusing lighting design from Christina Watanabe, in which the friends play hooky and test the limits of their professed heterosexuality with a game of “Chicken,” is both tense and hilarious.

When we meet them, these four teens seem uniquely unsuited to be one another’s primary support system. When Jordan asks, “You think I’d be a good teacher?,” Chris (Daniel Bravo Hernández) responds, “Nah. You’re kinda dumb. No offense.” But he’s dead wrong: We’ve just heard Jordan animatedly explain neuroscience with creativity and enthusiasm, the most lit-up we’ve seen him.

 Spread is loveliest in charting how each of its heroes get a little bit closer to offering real care, to fully recognizing one another’s humanity in the same way Valles’s play so clearly does. “Fuck you, respectfully,” Jordan snaps back after a particularly vicious ribbing from Andrew. By the end of the semester, he might actually mean it.