Maulik Pancholy (left) is Castor, and Jay Armstrong Johnson is his friend Curtis in JC Lee’s To My Girls.
In his new comedy-drama To My Girls, playwright JC Lee adds to a subgenre of plays about gay gatherings in which groups of friends thrash out problems and settle old scores with comic bitchiness. Mart Crowley’s The Boys in the Band is the forerunner of them all; later touchstones include Kevin Elyot’s My Night With Reg, Chuck Ranberg’s End of the World Party and Terrence McNally’s Love! Valour! Compassion! Lee’s To My Girls, under the direction of Stephen Brackett, is a respectable entry, reflecting a sea change in racial politics and behavior.
There is only one white character among the thirtysomethings who gather in Palm Springs on Arnulfo Maldonado’s living-room set, decorated in a riot of prints, with fuzzy barstool seats and a hassock resembling a ball of periwinkle Cheetos—“the whole Jonathan Adler aesthetic,” as Britton Smith’s Leo, a black man who is absorbed with social media, puts it.
Curtis and Castor welcome Leo (Britton Smith, center) at the start of a weekend in Palm Springs.
Leo has been invited by Curtis (a louche, likable Jay Armstrong Johnson) to share an Airbnb for a weekend with other friends, “people I desperately love,” says Curtis. “No matter what any of us does or goes through or will ever go through, we always have each other because we’re a family and family is forever.” (Those words are proof positive that things are not going to go well.) Curtis’s other friends include Castor (Maulik Pancholy), of South Asian heritage, who has pined for Curtis for years and nurses an inferiority complex, and a gay couple, Carman Lacivita’s Jeff and his partner Todd, who are running late.
It’s unclear whether the schematic racial mix (specified in the script) reflects the irrelevance that race holds in the characters’ generation or is perhaps an idealization. After all, bars that cater to a clientele of a particular race or ethnicity still exist, as they do for devotees of leather or drag.
But Lee’s gay millennials have few inhibitions. They mostly seem as comfortable in skimpy swimsuits that show off their musculature as they do flouncing in wigs, high heels and patterned caftans. When the desperate Castor dresses up for a comic confrontation late in the play, he’s in a getup that echoes a black-leather look but has a mesh fabric that nobody in the spiked-armband fraternity would wear. (Sarafina Bush’s costumes are smart and colorful.)
And self-hatred persists among some of these queers. Pancholy’s awkward Castor comes closest to a self-loathing stereotype. In a spat with Curtis, he says, “You need to check your privilege.”
Bernie and Curtis discuss house rules for a weekend rental in Palm Springs.
Curtis: “Excuse me?”
Castor: “You’re a handsome white guy with a good job and I’m, like, an Asian writer who works at Starbucks to pay the bills.”
But although Castor plays down his Starbucks job and introduces race to score a point, he later rebukes Curtis for calling him a barista: “I’m a shift supervisor.” He wants to have it both ways, and it’s no fault of Pancholy’s that the character becomes tiresome.
Indeed, Lee casts a jaundiced eye on the whole group, reflected best in Leo’s judgment: “I do think a fuck ton of gay men use sexual liberation as a stand-in for behaving like selfish boys well beyond their sell-by date.”
Lee also tackles a gay generational divide, represented by Bryan Batt’s flamboyant Bernie, the house’s older owner, who lives nearby and has occasion to call out the younger men: “The remarkable thing about your generation is your insistence everyone be accepting of all people up until you disagree.” Unfortunately, Lee undercuts the validity of what Bernie says by making him a Trump supporter. It’s a topic that deserves deeper exploration.
Pancholy with Bryan Batt (left) as Bernie and Noah Ricketts as Omar. Photographs by Joan Marcus.
Inevitably, sexual infidelities are revealed and racial issues are unpacked, particularly Curtis’s bad behavior with Noah Ricketts’s gym-toned, wryly amused Omar, a dance-club pickup who is genuinely interested in the self-sabotaging Castor. The scrapping eventually falls into overt melodrama until the arrival of an anguished Jeff pulls the play out of what feels like a rut.
Still, Lee freshens his work with amusing exchanges, sharp observation, and contemporary references: Brené Brown, Belinda Carlisle, Britney Spears albums, and a canceled Lady Gaga tour pop up.
The ending is ambiguous. A scene of weighty confrontation that bodes unhappiness dissolves when a song plays that sparks frolicking. “Having survived so much and accomplished so little,” says Castor moments earlier, projecting what future archeologists will say about them, “the millennial homosexual is remembered now only as a footnote to the generation that came before it and a confusing collection of insecurities to the one that followed.” Perhaps that is Lee’s point.
The 2nd Stage production of To My Girls runs through April 24 at the Tony Kiser Theatre (305 W. 43rd St.). Evening performances are at 7 p.m. Tuesday through Thursday and at 8 p.m. on Friday and Saturday; matinees are at 2 p.m. on Wednesday and Saturday and at 3 p.m. on Sunday. For tickets and information, call (212) 541-4516 or visit 2st.com/shows/to-my-girls.
