To My Girls, which opened tonight at the Second Stage Theater’s ancestral off-Broadway home, brings us along as a small gaggle of gay men unite for a Palm Springs weekend in the aftermath of the pandemic. It is a comedy with a message, and its apparent aspiration is to define and dissect gay friendships and manners among today’s 30-something set: a Boys in the Band in which the telephone game is played via TikTok, an Inheritance where the central homestead is a mid-mod vacation rental.
It fails.
The “girls” in question are primarily a trio of old friends who seem not to like each other at all. At the center is Curtis (Jay Armstrong Johnson), a New York transplant to Los Angeles who we’re told has found success as a social-media influencer. He’s brought along Castor (Maulik Pancholy), an aspiring writer who followed Curtis to L.A. but can count as his only career accomplishment a promotion from barista to shift supervisor, and Leo (Britton Smith), who still lives in New York and whose role in the play is to be aggressively woke. They’re waiting for their longtime-couple friends, Jeff and Todd, who are running late because they’re fighting. (Only Jeff, played by Carman Lacivita, ever shows, making a memorable entrance.) We hear a lot about the legendary fun they had when they all lived in New York, the unbreakable chosen family bonds they developed; mostly, we watch them bicker, whine, and undermine.
“I hope you all know you don’t have to stay friends with people once they turn into someone you don’t like,” comments Bernie (Bryan Batt), the eldergay from whom they rent the house (and who illogically keeps showing up while his tenants are in place). It’s a lesson none of them seems to have internalized, nor is it clear why we’d want to watch these mostly unlikeable people dislike each other.
Don’t misunderstand. To My Girls is often laugh-out-loud funny, in the bitchy, catty way gay men always are in plays about gay men. Playwright JC Lee is great with a one-liner. And I should confess that I am the sort of gay man who is allergic to group vacations, shared houses, and the Real Housewives-style drama they inspire.
But the problem here isn’t the flavor of gay so much as the flavor of the play: To My Girls is somehow both wildly tonally dissonant and also entirely monotonous. The boys put on Britney, the boys squeal, the boys argue, the boys turn earnest and sad; repeat, repeat, repeat, occasionally in drag. There is constant discussion of ruining or not ruining the weekend.
The crux is that Curtis, who is asserted to be by far the most handsome of the group (if not necessarily cast as such, abs notwithstanding) is selfish and narcissistic, taking advantage of his friends to boost his own ego. His main goal for the weekend is to shoot a video for social media, and there is lots of discussion of what it will mean, the emotional impact, of either failing or succeeding at that task.
Stakes thus raised about shin high, along the way there we also get exceedingly brief detours into first, intergenerational legacies of repression and release among gay men (there’s your Inheritance) and, later, the perils of millennial censoriousness and thus the temptations of a let-us-say-what-we-think Trumpism (from Bernie, whose apostasy is then quickly forgotten). Weirdly, the “for most of gay history…” conversation is between Castor and Omar (Noah J. Ricketts), the trick-with-a-brain he’s brought home from a bar, who don’t seem especially far apart in age but are presented as of entirely different eras. (Shouldn’t the point of Batt as Aunt Sassy be that he has the back-in-my-time lines?)
The sets, by Arnulfo Maldonado, are goofy, Desert Modern camp, and the costumes, by Sarafina Bush, feature endless and exuberant combinations of loud patterns and tight shorts. Stephen Brackett, who will soon be represented on Broadway by the much-anticipated A Strange Loop, directs at the intensity, pace, and laugh lines of an old British sitcom, and with about the same depth.
It will come as no surprise that Curtis continues to be a narcissistic asshole, that there is more drama and more threats to end friendships. It will also come as no surprise that the play somehow comes to a happy ending, that the boys do, eventually, do the dance and make the video. (As the retro music starts, Castor frets about whether the lineup of boys remember the steps, and there’s your Boys in the Band.)
What is something of a surprise is that a few moments before that finale, the plot gins up a way for Castor to read aloud the celebratory but plaintive essay he’d written on the night New York legalized gay marriage, in 2011. Addressed “to my girls,” it’s a lyrical confession of mixed emotions, a celebration of success and acceptance and a plea to keep alive what has made these men different.
It’s a sweet moment. Tt’s also unearned, out of character, and entirely disconnected from everything else in the play. One imagines it’s the key thing playwright Lee wanted to say.
To My Girls opened April 12, 2022, at Second Stage and runs through April 24. Tickets and information: 2st.com
