The Brooklyn Rail

When I was in college, I met a first-year student who earnestly told me he wanted to be president.

“Of what?” I asked. It was too perfect. For a second I thought he could be talking about his fraternity, student government, a club.

“Oh, of the country,” he said. He really meant it! I was floored and couldn’t believe I’d found this Type of Guy in the wild.

“What will you do,” I said, trolling now, “between now and thirty-five?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “Probably something in leadership?”

Indeed. Two years later he—allegedly, I suppose I should say, though the word feels so heavy on the tongue—raped a girl on campus. People said they knew it was serious because he flew home the next day. To find a lawyer, people explained. I hadn’t known that that was how you knew.

The titular Trophy Boys of Emmanuelle Mattana’s Off-Broadway debut, directed by the brilliant Danya Taymor, seem to know this by birthright. Owen, Scott, David, and Jared are seniors who together make up the Imperium debate team. We meet them at the peak of an undefeated season with one hour to prepare arguments for their final debate, a face-off against their equally prestigious sister school, and they’re about to open their assigned position. Owen writes it on the whiteboard: Feminism has failed women. The boys must argue in the affirmative.

This puts them in a predicament. With all of their privileges—and at one point, Jared literally unpacks his, pulling a Louis Vuitton wallet, a Hydroflask, a set of AirPod Maxes, and a MacBook out of his North Face backpack—they know they are not convincing messengers to foretell the death of feminism.

“But I love women,” Jared sighs.

Hyper-aware of their positionality and armed with all the knowledge that a 60,000 dollar per year tuition can buy, the boys still struggle to find logic without sacrificing the respectable, pseudo-feminist appearances they’ve been raised to maintain. After all, they know that only good boys get what they want. Like the boy I met in college, Owen (played by Mattana themself)—the team’s self-proclaimed star—wants to be president. Jared (Louisa Jacobson), the pretty boy, wants to be an artist. David (Terry Hu), the contrarian, wants attention from mommy and daddy. And Scott (Esco Jouléy)—well, the only thing I could ascertain is that he wants Jared.

What follows is an extremely pedantic summary of feminist infighting of the past fifty years, through the somewhat interesting mouthpieces of teenage boys played by non–cis-male actors. Owen proposes a strategy to “out-feminist the feminists” by rehashing the 2010s debate over white feminism and intersectionality, forcing the girls’ team to accept the flawed nature of feminist movements from the beginning. The boys talk in circles around each other until Owen finally suggests what might be the optimal solution: strategically forfeiting, bravely declining the position on principle.

But before reaching a conclusion, the great debaters get derailed: halfway through the play, Trophy Boys finally gains narrative stakes in the form of an anonymous accusation of sexual assault.

In an instant, their tight bond of team unity explodes. Through the shards, they turn on one another, pointing fingers and denying any association with the allegation. Perhaps it’s a false accusation from the girls’ team, they decide—an attempt to get in their heads and win the debate. No, Owen reminds them: they should believe women. But then, if they do believe women and maintain their collective innocence, isn’t there a logical fallacy at the bottom of it? Isn’t believing women an admission of guilt?

And so they speed toward collision, setting up a sort of Schrödinger’s rape. Whether they did it or not, they’ve all done something, and Mattana seems to make the point that their privilege and ambition will always cushion them from the consequences of their actions, turning their cruelties into abstractions.

For our four trophy boys, knowledge isn’t transformative, let alone redemptive—in fact, it’s defensive, a set of tools to guard against anyone who threatens their path to self-actualization. Case in point, Owen, the White House-bound nerd, chillingly reminding his teammates, “Let’s say, just for the purpose of the hypothetical, that I did do it. No girl wants to go through the shitshow of coming forward.” Knowledge, weaponized immediately to maintain power. The boy I met in college sprung back to mind.

Trophy Boys hits compelling notes and funny beats—like when Scott punches a hole in the wall and covers it up with a poster of Michelle Obama, or when Owen demands to be “on the right side of history by any means necessary.” But more often, its monologues blend together in a thick sludge of overwriting, sacrificing character and plot at the altar of polemic. Though all four boys track smoothly to recognizable archetypes, they rarely transcend them, which is to say: they rarely feel real.

In the debate world, Mattana writes in a program note, “Logic was a game, something to be won or lost, and words and arguments were things you could twist at your own whim. If you were articulate and commanding enough you could speak over anyone, or for anyone.”

Mattana clearly intends to satirize that world, and sometimes convincingly so. But overall, they end up recreating it by turning the central allegation into a logic puzzle, a construction of game theory. How much more revealing—how much more difficult and true—to contend with real people, rather than a set of reasonable persons. Surely that’s the only way feminism succeeds.