My Three Sons and All Their Troubles
Charles IsherwoodNovember 18, 2014: They bestride the world, or at least the West, like colossi. Thronging the halls of Congress and, until just recently, the Oval Office. Running giant corporations. Meeting and greeting at powwows in Switzerland. I speak of the species known as the straight white male, the most unoppressed of the world’s peoples. They are feared, envied, occasionally attacked and derided. But pitied? Not so much. The signal surprise of Straight White Men, written and directed by the ever-audacious Young Jean Lee, is that the play is not a full-frontal assault on the beings of the title. True, Ms. Lee does show these creatures in their natural habitat — among other straight white men — sometimes behaving like overgrown boys: sitting zombie-eyed on the couch, obsessively fiddling with a black plastic implement and slaughtering digital foes by the dozen; eating Chinese food right out of the boxes; razzing one another with puerile jokes. But Ms. Lee’s fascinating play, at the Public Theater, goes far beyond cheap satire, ultimately becoming a compassionate and stimulating exploration of one man’s existential crisis. Believe it or not, Ms. Lee wants us to sympathize with the inexpressible anguish of her protagonist, a middle-aged, upper-middle-class straight white man named Matt who has failed to follow the codes of achievement that he’s expected to conform to. The play takes place over the Christmas holidays, where three brothers are assembled at the family home, somewhere in the Midwest, to keep company with their widowed father. None come with wife, girlfriend or children in tow. The youngest, Drew (Pete Simpson), is an award-winning fiction writer. The middle boy, Jake (Gary Wilmes), is a hotshot banker with the swagger to match. Matt (James Stanley) is the oldest, and despite graying temples — he’s definitely north of 40 — he’s been living with Dad for a while now, working a series of small-time temp jobs at do-gooding social organizations.
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