Point of order: we—Kyle Turner, Billy McEntee, and Catherine Sawoski—have written about Emmanuelle Mattana’s Trophy Boys, dissecting its demerits, design, and debate, in that order. You, readers, may disagree with our use of evidence, but, criticism, like the opinions of the competing debaters in this American premiere, has always been a home for firm agreement, unabashed disdain, and everything in between. Maybe you will see the worth in our arguments, or maybe you will wish to voice your own. As Mattana’s play unequivocally reveals, it’s not what you say but how you say it that matters in the realm of high school debate. Choose your words, and their emphasis, carefully—we’d so love to hear them.
Argument: Good Intentions, But Where’s the Drama?
Kyle Turner
School’s out for the summer, but director Danya Taylor is always in the classroom. She’s literally throwing hands with the young guns under the harsh fluorescents (which usually flicker and transmogrify into some kind of dreamy aside, where characters take a moment to themselves, even amongst others, as in both Trophy Boys and Broadway’s John Proctor is the Villain). Or she’s with them as they face the troubling realities of what the world expects from young people and how often they’re forced to fit themselves within sliver-thin, locker-sized gender norms, as in the brash, nouveau West Side Story-ish The Outsiders.
As my compatriot and fellow critic Billy McEntee points out below, they all have their uniforms, be it in the street cazh of sweats, denim, or, as is the case in Trophy Boys, navy, grey, and white pleated fake dress clothing. In the ideal situation, characters are supposed to wear the clothes, not the other way around. And one could argue (and I shall do so) that the text is as much sartorial put on as the blazers emblazoned with the prep school’s logo and Latin slogan, and for much of Trophy Boys, the text wears its actors, in fairly dissatisfying ways.
Trophy Boys never really transcends its premise—high school debate team of boys map out how they will interrogate the ways in which feminism has failed women—or its provocations (a gender fluid cast that never finds a consistent internal logic of whether their performances of masculinity are built from sincerity or satire). That playwright Emmanuelle Mattana, who also plays Owen, the boy most aggressively literate in feminist political theory, aspires to lay out all their rhetorical cards on the homeroom desk is not a problem in and of itself—well intentioned liberals and lefties will find plenty to nod their head along to—but rather there’s not that much that is actually dramatized or turned into a kind of active tension.
That part of the drive for the foursome is to win the debate against their sister school is intriguing enough, but the show spends less time reveling in emotional tenor of the scheming, the planning, the argumentative diabolicalness and so much time doing a kind of checklist of all possible angles at which to enter the possible flaws and problems of feminist politics and who/what it has left out in the last century. There’s the nagging feeling that, like all the most basic plays with lofty theoretical ambitions, that these are less characters than they are mouthpiece-y archetypes that stand and leer in the doorway of any other dramaturgical approach. If Owen’s function is to describe the (often perfectly reasonable) shortcomings of feminist political practice (and its broader social/economic/political necessities), his compatriots in Jared, Scott, and David either lightly elaborate on such ideas or revive quasi-men’s rights talking points. But these rhetorical strategies feel less like the keen construction of characters within a show trying to win a debate in their own world, speaking to their own desires and senses of interiority, and more like the self-conscious devising of an outline on a pamphlet for the audience.
Mattana has shorn their world of texture, detail, or life; characters barely have hobbies or any mention of life outside of school beyond the rote noting of what industry they hope to ascend to after school. This makes Trophy Boys’ dramatic turn—one of the boys is accused of assault via an anonymous Instagram post—feel hollow and unearned. The catchall complicity of its characters and audience is a thesis topic more than it is a play. Trophy Boys offers a vibrant unpacking of the kinds of environments that encourage the dissonance of young men who can be at once fluent in the language of social justice and the jargon of feminist theory while simultaneously perpetrators of its literal and ontological violence.
Trophy Boys feels schematic, the outline for an assignment turned in at the last minute. It’s a potent reminder of Taymor’s more electric work on John Proctor is the Villain (written by Kimberly Belflower), a show willing to engage with the tragic, uncomfortable contradictions of young people figuring out their politics, values, and belief systems all while crashing into realities that are much messier than the ones bullet pointed on the syllabus.
Evidence: The Immaculate Sheen of Toxic Masculinity
Billy McEntee
I have a cousin who’s a teenage boy. I teach others in summer school, I tutor them on Zoom, and there’s one mainstay in their wardrobe: sweatpants. A sartorial “whatever, brah,” sweatpants exude the casual demeanor adolescent boys try to give off, the pants’ shapeless, grey blah a fitting start for young men on paths toward self-defining.
The boys in Emmanuelle Mattana’s Trophy Boys don’t get to wear sweats—they’re prep schoolers—but, in Danya Taymor’s production, design choices communicate young men’s tendencies to look cool by not caring.
Debate team champs David, Jared, Scott, and Owen wear costume designer Márion Talán de la Rosa’s school uniforms that, while the same, take wildly different silhouettes. Jared, the chill bro, goes blazer-free and button-open, a quiet lion. Scott, the jock, has no time for ties. Owen, the star orator, is textbook—a straight-laced, buttoned-up, well-coiffed Kennedy; in a theatrical moment of hormonal release set to angsty music, he rips his button-down shirt off—revealing another underneath. It is a delight.
However, David’s ancillary role as club advisor is not made clear until late in the show. As such, his design suffers: there is little to help him stand out, even if he looks, sure, clean as a club advisor would.
Shoewear gives the boys’ some further pop. Jared’s got well-loved but neat Adidas, Scott baller Nike Dunks, Owen this season’s J. Crew bootwear, and David gleaming mahogany loafers. (Márion, I do need a pair—where are those from?)
With a quartet of largely archetypal roles on stage, Mattana gives the team enough to play with to dress up individual characters, and Taymor finds other savvy ways to empower design to serve the production and its themes.
Entering MCC Theater, it’s hard not to jam to the pre-show music. Radio bops fill the playlist, but a second into swaying, you might pause: the songs are all problematic. In “Blurred Lines,” Robin Thicke’s title told us all we needed to know, and “Ignition” by R. Kelly gives airtime to a cancelled singer.
In priming us with these songs, through Fan Zhang’s sound design, Taymor asks audiences to consider these men: what power did they abuse, but also what solutions did we create in punishing them? Offenders are behind bars, but has that actually taught men how to handle desire, intimacy, and anger?
Mattana’s play shimmers most when asking these questions. The conversation moves away from the characters' central debate—whether feminism is good for women—and plunges rarely explored nuances of high school masculinity.
Scenic designer Matt Saunders creates a simple but detailed home for these discussions. The spare classroom at a rival girls’ prep school is immaculate—tuition is $60,000/year for the boys—so of course the houseplants are thriving and the whiteboards slide with ease. But there are also posters of RGB, AOC, and other acronymed ladies. One sign reads, “Well-behaved women rarely make history.” Is there a masculine equivalent of that quote? What signs are at the boys’ school? And what does it actually highlight that the boys revere these women, printed here in 2D, but—confronting real-life ones—choose to belittle their allegations and humanity?
Finally, it is Cha See’s ever-gracious lighting that tells the boys time is running out: their hour-long prep session is ending, and the sun is getting lower.
Shadows linger—manhood approaches.
Resolved: Emmanuelle Mattana’s Trophy Boys Wins on a Technicality
Catherine Sawoski
Early into my debating career, I learned that case topics should be fair to men. Leaving a tournament after running “the tampon tax should be abolished” (tampons are, in some states, still taxed as luxury goods), my brother told me it wasn’t right to make a male team argue against women. From then on, my partner and I shelved the case anytime we walked into a classroom with two men sitting at the other table. It wasn’t right, we discovered, to make them say something they didn’t believe.
In retrospect, I realize the boys I debated were scared of us “pulling the woman card,” as Trophy Boys’s titular teens curse and complain. The prep-schoolers, made to argue that “feminism has failed women,” bemoan how unfair it is. Should they resign on principle? Try to out-feminist the feminists? Once they resolve to win, however, their true colors show. “Feminism” is nothing more than a word they can weaponize, and empathy a strategic position.
As Emmanuelle Mattana writes in their author’s note, debate calls for assurance above all else. Right and wrong fall to the wayside as we argue viciously for sides we don’t believe in, and confidence matters more than truth. Danya Taymor’s direction utilizes meaningful fourth wall breaks, making the world a debate stage. We’ve been lured to admire Owen, the team's brains, but it only takes a single chilling look to the audience to realize that he’s been performing for us the entire time. Debate has taught him how to act in front of judges, careful to put on a convincing front.
The line between what the boys argue and what they believe disappears the longer the show continues, even though the turning point comes far too late. These boys consider themselves progressive—they “love women,” they insist—yet as they craft arguments about feminist overreach and makeup’s deception, their rhetoric reveals the truth about their actual beliefs. Owen thinks he can put on a mask to win the debate, but we quickly realize it’s the same size and shape as his normal face. In its best moments, the production uses debate to interrogate the narrow distance between saying something and meaning it, revealing the two are one and the same.
These moments of insight, however, are overwhelmed by more predictable choices. As my fellow critic Kyle Turner writes, the play fails to go beyond its engaging premise, and Mattana allows each character to become one-dimensional sexist archetypes. Many of the show’s themes are hyperbolic to the point of cringe (“I’m at my best around inspiring women” is the first line) and much of the hammy humor (desk twerking, penis drawings, a shouted “gaslight, gatekeep, girlboss”) is eyerollish in practice. Mattana's insights about performative belief—genuinely compelling in theory—are undermined by characters who feel more like debate positions than actual teenagers.
It’s a shame. I don’t remember the team my partner and I argued the tampon tax case against, but I know the 17-year-old boys lost. Perhaps if they had focused a bit more on speaking and less on believing, then they, unlike Trophy Boys, could have come out on top.
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Trophy Boys is playing now through July 27 at MCC Theater.
