InkBlog

New York Theatre Workshop, New York, New York
Beginning with the discovery of performance enhancing drugs in a locker-room, this play comes to the boil – and the lead actor deserves a medal for bravery

The splash of the butterfly, the speed of the freestyle, the palpable labor of the backstroke – these are not the methods of the playwright Lucas Hnath. Hnath is a breaststroke sort of guy: formal rigor, propulsive momentum, the sense that there’s a lot happening just below the surface.

Hnath deploys these gifts ably in Red Speedo at New York Theatre Workshop, a confident and sometimes cunning piece about sports doping. If not as formally inventive as some of his early plays (Isaac’s Eye, A Public Reading of an Unproduced Screenplay About the Death of Walt Disney) or as morally complex as his recent, The Christians, Red Speedo is easily the most topical work Hnath has produced and perhaps the most accessible.

The play begins in the practice pool of a swimming club, its unnaturally blue water throwing undulating reflections onto the tiled set, as Roy Orbison’s You Got It plays. When Ray (Alex Breaux), an Olympic hopeful with a precision-molded physique and a stoner’s drawl, heaves himself out of the pool, he finds himself at the center of an argument between his brother Peter (Lucas Caleb Rooney), a lawyer and Ray’s sports agent, and Ray’s coach (Peter Jay Fernandez). Performance enhancing drugs have been found in the club’s refrigerator. Peter wants them flushed, fearful that any hint of scandal will tarnish Ray’s Olympic prospects. The coach wants to report them to the proper authorities. Ray just wants them back. They are his drugs.

The rest of the play unfurls on the lip of that same pool, as the characters, who include Ray’s former girlfriend Lydia (Zoe Winters), a disgraced sports therapist, splash and clash over conflicting desires and systems of value. Some of these scenes are written in dialogue, but many take the form of alternating monologues. Hnath likes to let characters speak long enough and loud enough and fast enough to give themselves away, to allow the audience comes to know them better than they know themselves. The more lush and effusive the canopy of words, the more Hnath suggests the hollows underneath them.

Under Lileana Blain-Cruz’s direction, there is real fervor to these battles, even as a few of the twists are predictable (others definitely aren’t) and an emphasis on the characters’ venality somewhat relentless. There is a genuine sense of terror and violence to the fight that erupts, thumpingly choreographed by Thomas Schall, with an assist from Matt Tierney’s sound design. The actors have found the rhythm of the lines, if not always the way to make them sound natural. Still, they do adroit work, with Rooney’s bluster playing nicely against Fernandez’s stoicism and Breaux’s thick-headedness. Breaux, onstage for the play’s entirety, deserves some sort of endurance medal for spending so much of the show so damp, clad only in the titular tiny swimsuit and horrendous back tattoo, stripped even of body hair. Rarely has an actor had to do so much, while wearing so little.

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