Has feminism failed women?
That’s the uh-oh question facing the Imperium School’s senior debate team when asked to argue the affirmative in the finals of their league competition. But asserting that proposition against the girls from St. Gratia feels deeply uncomfortable to the four teenage boys who make up the team. Worse, it feels like a sure way to lose.
And losers are not what Imperium’s debaters, no matter how nerdy, are expected to be. How will they get into Yale or Harvard — or “maybe … like … N.Y.U.?” — if they’re caught defending the patriarchy? How will Owen, their best speaker, run for president one day, as he intends to, with video of him vivisecting feminism in the ether forever?
That’s the setup for Emmanuelle Mattana’s “Trophy Boys,” whose title suggests that what’s at stake is more than a contest. Regardless of their protestations of love for their mothers and sisters, the team members are mostly concerned with preserving their privilege as preppies and men. Their feminism is the kind that crumbles the moment it asks something of them beyond lip service.
“Trophy Boys,” which opened Wednesday at MCC Theater, addresses their bad faith in many ways but not, alas, in the most important one: a convincing narrative. Mattana begins with satire so broad it’s indistinguishable from burlesque, as the Imperium team arrives at St. Gratia for their power hour of prep time. How stoked they are by the posters of feminist thought leaders — Oprah, Malala, Yoko — plastering the walls! (The classroom set is by Matt Saunders.) “I am at my most inspired when surrounded by inspiring women,” Owen says.
Owen is portrayed by the playwright, who has made the casting of female, queer, trans and nonbinary actors “nonnegotiable.” Not that Danya Taymor’s production asks us to read their gray flannel, blue blazer, repp tie drag as real. (The costumes are by Márion Talán de la Rosa.) Especially when they roughhouse, leaping on desks and licking their notebooks, the cast overplays the characters’ youthfulness, making them seem less like a delivery system for gender commentary than a cartoon version of “Newsies.”
But if those choices take some of the sting out of the boys’ masculine cluelessness and bro-y vulgarity, they also amp up the ambient camp. Jared (Louisa Jacobson) is a sendup of WASP obliviousness, disowning his advantages while pulling a gold watch and Tesla keys from his backpack. Scott (Esco Jouléy) is clearly in love with him, even as he overcompensates with casually sexist remarks. And David (Terry Hu) is an arrogant incel whose most salient contribution to feminism is calling his father a cuck.
Taymor, an expert at teen dramas like “The Outsiders” and “John Proctor Is the Villain,” may have sensed another opportunity to explore the painful dramas of adolescence. But “Trophy Boys,” which premiered in Australia in 2022, is satirical, not earnest, and in leaning too strongly into its manic theatricality, Taymor supports the playwright’s vision at the cost of coherence. The two events that should change the direction of the plot, bending it toward seriousness, do not successfully manage the turn.
One is the revelation, early on, of the difficult debate topic, which elicits some potentially interesting arguments. Feminism has failed women by “failing different intersections of women,” Owen offers. David faults the movement for promoting equality that merely plays into our “polluting neo-capitalist colonial system” and thus does no one, including women, any good. But these arguments are delivered like sitcom one-liners, more for the rhythm than the content, which would be fine if they were funny.
In any case, the arguments are obviated by the shoehorned second revelation, which I will not spoil except to say that the debaters’ absurd handling of its aftermath reveals the play’s original prompt as a red herring. Instead it suggests a new one: “Are boys irredeemably stupid?”
The playwright writes in a program note that “as a competitive high school debater I spent a lot of time with the ‘good boys’; the supposedly clever, morally upstanding boys from elite private schools who were destined for the highest offices of power.” Perhaps those “good boys” were unaware enough to present their masculinity, as these characters do, in such obviously cancelable ways. I doubt it, though.
A richer treatment might explore the original prompt more thoroughly, along with the irony of having boys defend it. A longer running time might help, too; at 70 minutes — about the same as the team’s prep time — “Trophy Boys” is hampered by a very narrow turning radius. But even if twice the length, it would have to decide whether painting a bunch of adolescents as insufferably dim, when they are also meant to be monsters-in-training, makes for winning drama.
I can say that it doesn’t make a winning argument: The two characterizations nullify each other, leaving the audience to shrug. The promised debate isn’t even a draw; it’s a forfeit.
Trophy Boys
Through July 27 at MCC Theater, Manhattan; mcctheater.org. Running time: 1 hour 10 minutes.
Jesse Green is the chief theater critic for The Times. He writes reviews of Broadway, Off Broadway, Off Off Broadway, regional and sometimes international productions.
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