Review: ‘Straight White Men,’ Now Checking Their Privilege on Broadway

You’ll have plenty to talk about after seeing “Straight White Men,” the smart and thorny Broadway anomaly that opened at the Helen Hayes Theater on Monday. But don’t plan on talking much beforehand.

That’s because the preshow music is deliberately deafening. In the script, the playwright Young Jean Lee specifies “loud hip-hop with sexually explicit lyrics by female rappers.” Worth noting is the slight change from the play’s debut at the Public Theater in 2014, when the lyrics she specified were all that plus “nasty.”

Nastiness of any sort is not part of this Broadway outing, a Second Stage production directed by Anna D. Shapiro. The confrontational tone of the opening, as of the rest of the play, has been softened significantly. As soon as the lights dim, two charming “persons in charge” — Kate Bornstein, a gender theorist who defines herself as nonbinary, and Ty Defoe, a two-spirit member of the Oneida and Ojibwe nations — take the stage to apologize for any discomfort the music might have caused.

“Kate and I are well aware that it can be upsetting when people create an environment that doesn’t take your needs into account,” Mr. Defoe says, tongue in cheek.

Their presence, as well as the play’s title, may lead you to expect a scathing indictment of privilege, or at least an anthropological dissection of it. (A literal frame around the stage bears the caption “Straight White Men,” as if it were a diorama in a natural history museum.) And when the sparkly curtain rises on a middle-class basement family room, apparently decorated by the patriarchy itself — but really by the set designer Todd Rosenthal — the expectation of parody is further aroused.

That’s not what you get.

For one thing, the Nortons — Ed, a widower, and his three adult sons — are hyperaware of their relative good fortune and the unfairness to others it unavoidably entails. As children, the boys played a board game called Privilege, invented by their mother, that repurposed a Monopoly set to teach lessons about racism, denial and economic oppression. Whoever got the iron or thimble received a bonus for “unpaid domestic labor.”

The game’s challenge has not been lost on the boys as adults, though they each deal with it differently. Jake (Josh Charles) has become the very thing his mother probably hoped to prevent: a banker who drives a BMW, tells homophobic jokes and keeps nonwhite associates from advancing. (But at least he knows he’s wrong.) His younger brother, Drew (Armie Hammer), is convinced that by writing an antimaterialist novel and teaching one class a week he is using his abilities “in service to something bigger than myself.”

Jake’s complacency and Drew’s pretensions get punctured over the course of Christmas at Ed’s, amid family traditions including plaid pajamas, raillery and eggnog. (The old game of Privilege gets dragged out, too.) Though there is a slight, overbright satirical edge, Ms. Lee mostly paints Jake and Drew with the kind of sympathy and insider knowledge only an observant outsider could muster.

But they are not the play’s problem; the biggest threat they pose to the status quo is their superannuated roughhousing. In their early 40s, they still give each other wedgies.

Rather, it’s the oldest brother, Matt (Paul Schneider), who precipitates a crisis. Burdened by decades of student debt — and by an unexplained failure to thrive that has left him a self-described loser — he has returned home to live with Ed (Stephen Payne). He cleans and cooks, and would fully earn the unpaid domestic labor bonus if it really existed.

Though Matt says he’s happy with his choice, his upscale brothers, noting his horrible clothes, worry that he’s depressed. (The dead-on costumes are by Suttirat Larlarb.) His temp job making copies at a local community organization reads to them as a form of self-flagellation, so far beneath his abilities as to suggest pathology or, even worse, politics. Jake thinks Matt has deliberately suppressed any ambition to make room for others who have traditionally been excluded from positions of authority. Drew thinks he needs therapy.

Instead of resolving the mystery of Matt, Ms. Lee astutely complicates it. In boyhood, he was the most rigorously committed of the three to social justice, even forming a school for young revolutionaries whose fight “song” was an excerpt from Hegel. But as the wrangling over Matt becomes the main action of the play’s second half, the tonal shift from naked comedy to psychological witch hunt — it’s almost like a “Crucible” for underachievement — starts to seem heavy-handed.

You would expect no less from Ms. Lee, a downtown fixture whose home base from 2003 to 2016 — Young Jean Lee’s Theater Company — became notable for pulling real drama out of artificial constructions. If “Straight White Men” seemed bigger and more naturalistic than her typical work when it played Martinson Hall, a 199-seat black box theater at the Public, it was still aptly disorienting, maintaining the aura of surrealism that came from her years on the experimental vanguard.

But at the 581-seat Helen Hayes, recently restored to its former Broadway glory, some of that aura has faded. The casting of shiny actors like Mr. Hammer (of “Call Me By Your Name”) and Mr. Charles (of “The Good Wife”) has the perverse effect — though they are both spot on — of making the play seem mainstream. So does Ms. Shapiro’s direction, which is confident and highly polished; even the boys’ mortifying, half-remembered rec-room dance routines are snappily choreographed, by Faye Driscoll.

Under Ms. Lee’s direction at the Public, the play was shaggier and, paradoxically, more coherent; something about this knotty material, with its complex point of view and shifting tonalities, benefits from a crude attack. In the current production, I missed the brutality of the final confrontations, which now seem to pass in a haze of tough love.

That said, “Straight White Men” is still an exceedingly odd — and thus welcome — presence on Broadway. It remains undeniably powerful, especially when Mr. Schneider, excellent as the forlorn and heartbreaking Matt, tries to make his family understand something he can barely articulate to himself.

Despite the play’s title and the themes it juggles, Matt’s unspoken message isn’t about straight white male privilege, unless Ms. Lee is suggesting that refusing your advantages is itself a form of privilege.

The despair of “Straight White Men” is in any case more universal than that. It affects people of all stripes, which is why Ms. Bornstein and Mr. Defoe hover near the action throughout. They and Ms. Lee seem to be asking how, in a world where worth is determined by economic output, good people can still be useful.

One might ask the same of good plays.