KRASS's "Straight White Men" -- Privilege is More Than a Game

Korean American playwright Young Jean Lee is not ambiguous about the subject matter of her 2014 play, Straight White Men, or the purpose of the work. She sets out to examine various behaviors of cis-gender white guys and how they either reinforce or refute the privilege that society that has disproportionately rewarded to them, ever since white men of means set up that structure. With the emotional distance of an anthropologist, Lee’s play puts four guys on display in their natural habitat — a father and his three adult sons, returning to their childhood home to celebrate Christmas. It is a “safe,” private space for the family where, in addition to having permission to revert to the roles of their childhood, the men can be themselves, away from all judgement, save from one another. But to recenter the narrative, Lee’s play provides two People in Charge who curate the show for the audience. These guides are emphatically not straight white men. According to the script, they demonstrate the concept of privilege to the audience and completely control the performance. 

Kathie Rasmussen Women’s Theatre (KRASS) is currently producing Straight White Men at the Bartell, through Dec. 21. But under the direction of Suzan Kurry and under the influence of a very heavy handed production concept, the play’s frame, its intention, its characters, and ultimately its impact is not clear.

Much of the play unfolds as a typical family drama. Three distinctly different brothers reunite at their father’s house over the holidays to revisit old rituals and check in with the widowed patriarch Ed (an old school Joseph Lutz). Ed’s the kind of straight white guy who got a good job as an engineer, married his sweetheart, had children, made enough money to send his kids to college and retire comfortably. He ignored his own desires to fulfill his duties as husband and provider, and was so absent from actually raising his sons that he barely recognizes the stories they tell about their youth. 

Jake (a sadistic Brian Belz) is the ultra-masculine bully, eager to demonstrate his dominance through his physical strength, his financial success as a banker, and the relentless hazing of his younger brother Drew (a sensitive Brent Holmes). He is the kind of straight white guy who uses his black ex-wife as a prop to demonstrate his progressive cool but actively perpetuates the system that crowns him king of the hill. 

Drew is the baby of the family who is the kind of straight white guy who overcame depression and a miserable childhood as the butt of every joke his brothers could conceive, only to become wildly successful as an author and academic. He is the only family member who’s unafraid to have feelings, but he also reverts to whining for attention. 

And then there’s Matt (a complicated Stephen Montagna), the eldest son who had such a promising start. He is the straight white man who failed to launch. A Harvard grad and perpetual PhD candidate, Matt has dropped out of life. With no big degree, no big job or any big plans, he lives with his father, cooking and cleaning and working a temp job for a social service organization. Not only does his failure frighten the rest of the family, his lack of ambition is mystifying and his emotional state is questioned. Alternately bursting into tears and insisting he’s fine, Matt becomes a project for each of the other family members to fix, over the course of the long weekend.

If these characters seem like stereotypes, they are supposed to be. Lee conducted extensive workshops with actors in developing the play to define “typical” straight white men, understand their fears and desires, and even accurately emulate their speech patterns, so she could put them onstage for our review.

The actors are convincing as a family — often expressed through their communal in-jokes, family traditions, horseplay, nicknames and dance routines that recall teenage adventures. But it’s up the actors to imbue the characters with an underlying, familial love. On that level, the play is only partially successful. Although Jake brags at one point that he’s charming and likable, Belz comes off as a creepy predator with a mean streak. His revelatory speech admitting to his own prejudice and misogyny sounds more like bragging than a confession. And as the fine upstanding sit-com dad of the ‘50s, Lutz’s Ed feels perpetually stiff and clueless. As Matt, Stephen Montagna is an enigma — to himself, to his family and to the audience, which is a strong choice, but one with little emotional payoff. As Drew, Holmes is the only one able to create real connection and he is by far the easiest to empathize with, although that may not have been the play’s intent. 

At the play’s end, Matt is revealed as the straight white man who is rejected by his own tribe. Refusing to reap any benefits from his privilege, he is paralyzed by guilt and fear of making the world a worse place, simply by living in it. And we are encouraged to feel sorry for Matt, when the play’s last image focuses on a Person in Charge, Shauntel Burzynski, hugging him as he sobs. 

But this is the opposite message to the one embedded in the script’s final stage directions; that he is ignored. Perhaps that is because “dropping out and giving up” isn’t an option for most people with tons of student loan debt and regular bills to pay. It’s actually the ultimate act of privilege to simply refuse to play a game that you can’t win by packing up your toys and going home.

This is not the only large departure from the script that Kurry inserts into this production, doing a real disservice to the story. As scripted, there is a jolting and intentionally uncomfortable pre-show framing device that illustrates privilege to the audience on a personal level. By contrast, on opening weekend audience members were greeted by two extremely friendly and chatty People in Charge, Shauntel Burzynski and D.J. Xayasouk, and escorted to our seats with requests to let them know if there is anything they can do to make the show more pleasant. 

In another departure from the script, the People in Charge ad-lib throughout scene changes, which they oversee, moving actors around the space as well as moving furniture. Although both Burzynski and Xayasouk are personable, neither seems confident or comfortable during these interludes, weakening their credibility as the ones actually in control of the story. 

While it is certainly the purview of the director to make her own decisions about how a play will be presented, these changes weaken the overall experience.

The play also creaks under the weight of a stifling production concept. It is set up as an enormous game, with the People in Charge competing against each other from the corners of the playing space, using the straight white male cast members as pieces and starting each of the scenes with lighted controllers. Amy C. May’s set and props design is evident first on the floor of the living room — which looks like a giant game board complete with two blocks painted as enormous dice — then every prop, from the Christmas tree and ornaments, to a holiday pie, drinking glasses, Chinese takeout, a cell phone, wrapped presents and a checkbook. They are all made of the play money, tokens, dice shakers or boards from games like Monopoly and Scrabble.  

This was no doubt inspired by the plot point involving the (now deceased) mom of the family trying to teach her sons to be good people. She converts a Monopoly set into a game called “Privilege,” to call attention to the advantages that they enjoy as white males. Being aware of their position, she theorized, could help the boys correct imbalances and bias all around them. Based on the family’s behavior over the holiday visit, her efforts had wildly mixed results. In addition, casting the straight white men as pawns in a game that pits LGBT people of color against one another is antithetical to the entire exercise. It also removes the boys and their dad from any responsibility for their own actions, which is really not the point of the play.