Arts

“To My Girls” is a millennial “Boys in the Band.” But it’s hard to buy into the gay friendships on stage, as the play holds forth on social media, race, white privilege, and sex.

Here’s the idea. Take a group of gay men, stir in alcohol, and watch the zingers fly and drama explode. This familiar recipe—in life and fiction—can be fun for a few minutes, and exhausting for many minutes following.

The ghost of Mart Crowley’s legendary gathering of boozers and bitchers, The Boys in the Band, hangs over JC Lee’s 90-minute play To My Girls (2nd Stage, to April 24). Here, three supposed friends (and two Godot-like missing en route) rent a house in Palm Springs for the weekend to ostensibly reconnect, but really—this seems to be what most excites them—make a music video in drag for social media. Just as in any drama where the party is a focus, secrets, lies, and truths soon bubble up, and the weekend implodes.

The first mystery watching Castor (Maulik Pancholy), Leo (Britton Smith), and Curtis (Jay Armstrong Johnson) reunite is why they are friends, or remain friends, at all. They are in their late 30s, and what affection there seems to be between them is rooted in long-ago memories of clubbing at (first generationally specific reference alert!) Sugarland in Brooklyn.

There is the transactional nature of their social media post sharing. But they don’t seem to like each other. They don’t act like friends. Curtis is a racially insensitive user who doesn’t bother to hide it—and why any person, much less two gay men of color, would choose to spend any time around him is a mystery. The play seems to be about the end of friendships rather than their half-hearted maintenance.

People sometimes say “it’s a lot” when trying to express the magnitude or complexity or mess of a situation. And so it is with To My Girls, which is the very definition of “a lot.” If you get past the puzzle of why any of them are spending the weekend together, you may observe the set and mull how very Jonathan Adler it looks—and then a character says the same thing.

The show proudly displays very specific pop-cultural, gay-scene references, and expects the audience to know them too. The characters define themselves as millennials—but the kind of repetitive generation-patrolling the play is couched in can be the most predictable and boring way to judge anyone’s character, particularly in fiction.

The set is the living room of the Palm Springs rental owned by Bernie (Bryan Batt), a gay man in his 60s who is written as puzzlingly as the younger guys. It has fur-trimmed barstools, and Curtis is given strict instructions not to water the palm tree because it’s plastic and may get moldy.

Like that one, the many zingers when they hit, hit beautifully like: “I know Tinder in the Valley sounds like the title of a romance novel but I assure you it’s not.” Hoopler is described as the dating app for gay men who like basketball. When the group drags up as the Pussycat Dolls, they all want to be “Nicole” and struggle to name any of the others. As Leo, Smith particularly nails the tricky, eddying currents of comedy and drama.

“I like to think of everyone who rents the house as part of an extended family,” says Bernie. But in reality he wants likes on Instagram, and Curtis is an influencer and so will provide some publicity via the shooting of the video there. “Wow. See that? It really does get better,” replies Castor, with enough pointedness to make you think the play is going to explore the faultlines of what “the gay community” means. If only.

Curtis is a certain kind of gay man: white, hot, in his 30s, and selling himself as a brand. The play’s characters roast him over and over again for this. “You promote a handful of brands to a mob of thirsty faggots, Curtis, you’re not a Kardashian. But we are again in debt to your ceaseless self-promotion,” says 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,” Castor also tells him. And yet Castor, we are also led to believe, is really in love with him, and Curtis knows this and has been using him to feed his own vanity. He seeks the same validation from Leo, after the latter confesses to a long-standing crush. And then the muscular Omar (Noah J. Ricketts) enters, leading to more suspect behavior from Curtis.

“I was young. I was naive. I over-romanticized [Andrew Holleran’s classic gay-themed novel] Dancer From the Dance and I thought watching Sex and the City was a personality,” says Castor of moving to New York City when he was younger. Later, on the social media purpose for the group’s reuniting, he says: “I refuse to allow this weekend to revolve around some godforsaken millennial cry for validation.” He is wise to so many things it just seems implausible that he has been such a willing dimwit in his own private life.

Bernie tells the group the central truth of the play: “I hope you all know you don’t have to stay friends with people once they turn into someone you don’t like. The sooner you realize that, the happier you’ll be”—yet this truth is hobbled by another revelation about Bernie later on, which turns the group and audience against him.

Leo delivers some fantastic takedowns aimed at Curtis, his white privilege, and “racism dressed as fetish,” as he notes his, as a Black man, and Curtis’ very different experiences of Provincetown.

But one wishes that Leo, Castor, Curtis, and the other characters existed as characters rather than as deliverers of speeches from the social categories they have been assigned to speak for. Curtis is a louse in every way, but there is not much point having a character existing as he comes to do in near-silence, basically muttering “I’m sorry.”

The title of the play comes from a flowery, elegiac piece of writing, written by Castor the day same-sex marriage was legalized in New York. But the character who wrote the speech “to my girls” is not the character we meet on stage, unless he banged his head on that day and briefly thought he was indeed channeling Andrew Holleran.

To this critic anyway, the end of the play made zero sense. A friendship is brought to its rightful conclusion by the right person. And then, moments later, it seems forgotten as the group of friends dances again… just because. The correct ending, given the themes of the play, should be the end of the friendship, or a realization or something flowing from that termination. Perhaps it was felt the show needed to end on an “up,” and so it’s on with the drag and back to dancing. The strange denouement suggests To My Girls is too afraid to follow through on its own dark premise.