Review: Trophy Boys, Off-Broadway’s Introduction to Our Future Rulers

The American political press treats presidential debates with the same giddy anticipation 5-year-olds reserve for Christmas morning. And why wouldn’t they? Our most prestigious newspapers and TV networks are peopled by graduates of the same handful of elite educational institutions that feed directly into politics—schools where rhetorical skill equals virtue, or at least the ability to crush one’s adversaries with words, a prerequisite for participation in a republic founded by a bunch of lawyers.

Emmanuelle Mattana offers an eye-opening look at the rising ruling class of this country on the eve of its 249^th birthday in Trophy Boys, now making its US premiere at MCC Theater. A pointed critique of gamified discourse and the opportunism inherent in our so-called meritocracy, it’s also occasionally funny.

It’s about the debate team of Imperium, an elite all-boys prep school. Owen (playwright Mattana) is a tightly wound dork with all the correct opinions, his sights set firmly on the White House. Jared (Louisa Jacobson) is an aspiring Hollywood heartthrob—he may not be the smartest debater, but it pays to be attractive in a time when politics is mostly theater. Athlete Scott (Esco Jouléy) certainly understands his best bro’s appeal, just as surely as he knows that his lawyer father can bail him out of any jam. As team advisor, David (Terry Hu) doesn’t debate in competition, but since his mom sits on the boards of eight multinational corporations, he’s someone to keep around.

The 70-minute play takes place entirely within a classroom at a rival all-girls school, where the Imperium boys will be debating the proposition “Feminism has failed women,” in the affirmative.

Owen sees only two viable options: Take the “intersectional” route and argue that since (bourgeois white) feminism has not liberated racial and sexual minorities, it has failed. Or, they could forfeit “in solidarity with our female and non-binary peers.” Either way, it will impress the woke college-age adjudicators of the debate and boost their profile with Ivy League admissions officers—and that’s the real goal, right?

Mattana, who had plenty of time for up-close character study as a former high school debater, tells a tremendously cynical (but perfectly plausible) story about these boys who would be boyars: They’ve learned all the fashionable court manners, but don’t actually believe in anything. Their oft-repeated refrains of “I love women” and “I believe women” have all the sincerity of a Catholic school boy rushing through his 23^rd “Hail Mary” so he can get behind the bleachers in time to fingerbang his girlfriend. Only when a bombshell revelation threatens to derail the team do their true priorities come into focus, as the boys begin looking for a scapegoat to sacrifice. It’s Gossip Girl meets Lord of the Flies.

Director Danya Taymor plays with our expectations by stuffing the top half with drag king buffoonery (none of the actors are biological males), as these horny adolescents pitch their voices down and hump the classroom furniture to Pretty Ricky’s “Grind With Me” (playful sound design by Fan Zhang). It’s a mildly amusing sight within the girlboss dojo Matt Saunders has designed for the set, complete with inspirational posters of Ruth Bader Ginsberg and Michelle Obama. We settle in for a warmed-over lampoon of the patriarchy.

But Mattana’s script is subtler than that, simultaneously broader in its critique of power and more surgical in its dissection of its present trappings. All four actors imperceptibly grow sincerer in their performances as the stakes rise, their individual ambitions more nakedly revealed (costume designer Márion Talán de la Rosa finds an impressive range of expression within the limits of a school uniform, as any private school kid would).

Mattana’s portrayal of Owen is particularly notable, as the star student unleashes his inner mob boss (lighting designer Cha See bracingly illuminates this transformation in a segment that pulls the curtain back on the theater of debate). But perhaps such brutality is required of our rulers in an age when the mask of propriety is falling away to reveal the ugly face of raw power that has always been there.

Most disturbingly, Trophy Boys indulges the growing suspicion that our ruling class is held together through blackmail and mutually assured destruction—a notion that Jeffrey Epstein and P. Diddy have done so much to advance. We delude ourselves into believing that a reckoning will clean house. The purges of #MeToo and Black Lives Matter have merely culled the ranks of the American aristocracy of its weakest members, allowing the most brutal and shameless to survive and eventually take their places as our celebrities, CEOs, and presidents.