Freed from her Victorian corsets as earnest Marian Brook of TV’s current The Gilded Age series, Louisa Jacobson rips into a juicy contemporary role as a swaggering prep school bro in Trophy Boys. Ball cap backwards, oxford shirttails flying, Jacobson rages around as a boisterous jock who constantly and hoarsely proclaims, “I love women!” amidst Emmanuelle Mattana’s short, sharp, seriocomic study in toxic masculinity.
According to the playwright’s non-negotiable terms, her drama’s four 17-something male characters must be enacted by female, gender non-conforming and/or non-binary performers wearing schoolboy drag. Opening on Wednesday, MCC Theater’s American premiere of the Australian author/actor’s award-winning 2022 drama provides just such a company of excellent players. Their fierce performances can be surprisingly funny in director Danya Taymor’s keenly tuned staging of the play.
Composed by Mattana to transpire during a real-time 70 minutes, the one-act Trophy Boys unfolds inside a classroom at a private school for girls. Portraits of Margaret Thatcher, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Yoko Ono and a dozen more female icons serenely gaze down upon the four guys visiting from another elite academy as they scramble into the room. They are Ivy League-bound champion debaters, inhabiting this space for the next hour to prepare arguments for their imminent face-off with the girls’ debate team. Going in, the boys learn they are to argue in the affirmative the notion that feminism has failed.
[Read Melissa Rose Bernardo’s ★★★★☆ review here.]
How’s that for a loaded topic? Not incidentally, the playwright was once a competitive high school debater. In a note in the program, Mattana observes how “the very nature of the endeavor – turning argument into sport while believing yourself the smartest in any room – required you fervently argue things you didn’t know enough about or even necessarily believe.”
Such is the situation for Trophy Boys, which begins as a bright satire of privileged smarties as they strategize sincere or specious gambits for their debate. Matters get darker some 20 minutes into the session when an anonymous Instagrammer asserts how she was sexually assaulted by one of the debaters. So who’s the guilty one? Speculation, accusations, bullying and confessions follow.
Mattana packs plenty of story into her tightly-wound play. There’s also a noticeably schematic quality to the otherwise well-written Trophy Boys, as if it were a geometry exercise worked out in dramatic terms. For a while, spectators are unlikely to note the stylized nature of the text and Taymor’s calibrated staging; distracted by the personal heat of the performances blazing away in MCC’s 100-seat black box space, configured here for stadium viewing. Louisa Jacobson takes gung-ho advantage of the flashiest role as a jock with artistic leanings. Emmanuelle Mattana has written for herself an especially layered character as the fastest talker and deepest thinker in the bunch, whom she portrays with an anxious sort of energy. Solidly depicting their buds, Terry Hu and Esco Jouléy effectively convey their characters’ shifting emotions.
Production values are modest and supportive. Scenic designer Matt Saunders delivers an ultra-realistic classroom. Costume designer Márion Talán de la Rosa dresses everyone appropriately, while Cha See’s lighting aptly punctuates the drama as does Fan Zhang’s occasionally raging sound design. Of course while watching the drama play out, one can’t help but wonder how the toxicity level of Trophy Boys might register if male actors were playing those characters.
Trophy Boys opened June 25, 2025, at the MCC Theater Space and runs through July 13. Tickets and information: mcctheater.org
