Trophy Boys Off-Broadway Reviews

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.

Trophy Boys, according to Mattana’s notes in her script, is meant to make its way from caricature to naturalism—midway through the play’s one act, she reveals a secret about something bad one of the boys may have done—but it’s not a tonal shift that she and Taymor successfully effect. Even by the end of the play, I still felt as if I were watching paper characters conjured for the sake of a clean argument in a debate, in the way that you do high-school physics calculations without accounting for air resistance.

Cleverly conceived—and often sharply funny—“Trophy Boys” nevertheless often feels like a debate itself, with Ms. Mattana expounding upon various ideas about the current discourse around gender and the reverberations of the MeToo movement, sometimes at eye-glazing length.

Running a snappy 70 minutes from start to finish, Emmanuelle Mattana’s sly dark comedy Trophy Boys is a small play that thinks big — and, to its credit, out of the box.

Gender differences can be heavy-going material for the stage, but here Mattana manages with real wit and insight to highlight the warping and depressing affects that gender norms can instill on young minds. In program notes, the writer asserts that gender is “not only learnt but taught” and urges us to examine our deep-seated notions about masculinity and see it for “a comical, absurd and ultimately disturbing performance.” The same could be said for this play.

Trophy Boys, Emmanuelle Mattana’s slash-and-burn send-up and takedown of toxic masculinity at MCC Theater, meets a quartet of seniors from a boys’ private high school—perhaps the peak of privilege. The twist: All the guys are played by female-identifying, gender nonconforming, or nonbinary performers… That should tell you something about the tone that she, Tony-winning director Danya Taymor, and the four actors...are aiming for: lightness and laughter as they cut into the core of a serious issue.

Such is the situation for Trophy Boys, which begins as a bright satire of privileged smarties as they strategize sincere or specious gambits for their debate. Matters get darker some 20 minutes into the session when an anonymous Instagrammer asserts how she was sexually assaulted by one of the debaters. So who’s the guilty one? Speculation, accusations, bullying and confessions follow. Mattana packs plenty of story into her tightly-wound play.