Jared (Louisa Jacobson, background) rehearses the debate team’s summation, while Owen (Emmanuelle Mattana), David (Terry Hu), and Scott (Esco Jouléy) listen, in Mattana’s play Trophy Boys.
In Emmanuelle Mattana’s Trophy Boys, four debaters huddle in an empty schoolroom (nifty scenic design by Matt Saunders), strategizing for the final match of an interscholastic tournament. They’re seniors at Imperium, an elite boys’ prep school; the imminent debate is against a team from a similarly tony girls’ school. This is the swan song of the boys’ high-school extracurricular lives. They’re undefeated and, being fiercely ambitious, terrified of losing this last debate, especially to a female team.
Owen (background) encourages Jared (left) and Scott as they brainstorm about defensive arguments for their final debate in an interscholastic tournament.
Mattana is a member of the four-person cast, as well as the author. In its original form, Trophy Boys was set (and premiered) in Australia, Mattana’s homeland. The current version takes place near New York City. Despite U.S.-oriented modifications, this depiction of private-school students and their world retains a whiff of the Commonwealth. But this is satire, and the lack of strict verisimilitude is irrelevant.
Mattana’s script sketches the surface of the four characters with some intricacy; the writing seldom, if ever, plunges deeper. In a production note, Mattana says she wants the boys “played by female, gender-nonconforming and nonbinary performers in drag” (that, she declares, is “nonnegotiable”). The casting lends a gimmicky, sketch-comedy feel to an enterprise already wackily satiric. The four boys (rumpled preppy uniforms by costume designer Márion Talán de la Rosa) are: Owen (Mattana), a would-be intellectual, bossy and effeminate; Jared (Louisa Jacobson), charismatic, popular, concealing same-sex affinities beneath relentless reminders that he really, really likes women; Scott (Esco Jouléy), a jock insecure in his masculinity and unswerving in his affection for Jared; and David (Terry Hu), the team’s emotionally-withholding ombudsman, who cultivates detachment with utmost care. Mattana says the characters should be imbued with “caricature” and “camp” but, ultimately, handled with “unsettling naturalism.”
“Each claims devotion to feminist ideals; yet chauvinism is visible beneath a thin veneer of liberal ideology. ”
At the outset of their strategy session, the boys unseal an envelope and learn the topic of their debate and the position they’ll be defending: “That feminism has failed women—Affirmative.” In the limited time before facing their opponents, the debaters will grapple with the implications of society’s expectations for males and females and their own unexamined feelings about gender and sexuality (plus some ugly deportment issues they’ve relegated to the back of their minds). They’ll also experience dips in self-assurance and wild anxiety. Each claims devotion to feminist ideals; yet chauvinism is visible beneath a thin veneer of liberal ideology. The boys consider several approaches for defending their assigned position; but they’re uneasy about the whole topic, fearing what they say today may haunt them tomorrow via online video clips.
At a loss for strategy and racing against the clock, the debaters snipe at one another and consider defying the tournament rules by going to the Internet for inspiration. Owen resists the urge to cheat; the other three are conscience-free in that regard.
Jared: [to Owen] Get your laptop out of your … bag. No one is going to see.
Owen: It’s unethical!
Scott: So?
Owen: It’s against the rules.
Jared: Not now, Owen.
Owen wrestles his conscience a bit further (though not long), but after an abrupt, unreflective “change of spirit,” announces to himself: “The only unethical thing would be to lose and let the boys down.”
Jared comforts Scott, who is suffering a momentary identity crisis, in Trophy Boys. Photographs by Valerie Terranova.
Under Danya Taymor’s direction, the actors move at breakneck speed, distracting spectators’ attention from the shortcomings in the vaudeville-inflected script. Tilly Evans-Krueger, who’s in charge of movement, deserves applause for the range and hilarity of masculine posturing in the cast members’ agitated but very funny performances.
Taymor, who snagged a 2025 Drama Desk Award for directing the current Broadway production of Kimberly Belflower’s John Proctor Is the Villain (a more serious but no less comedic treatment of adolescent angst), has created a well-oiled ensemble from the quartet of youthful actors. Taymor is fast building a career with productions about the neuroses of youth (she won a 2024 Tony for directing The Outsiders). Her guiding hand enhances the contours of Trophy Boys and deepens its emotional colors to the extent possible.
There’s a limit to what can be achieved with a script that never strays far from sketch comedy (even late in the game, when the action takes dark turns). Without a profound, late textual shift and more intricate characterization, the director and actors can’t reach the “unsettling naturalism” with which Mattana would like to conclude the play. Yet Trophy Boys stirs up, with a relatively light touch, socio-political issues cowering on the down-low since the emergence of Trump 2.0. Taymor’s production is a humorous, stiff-upper-lipped response to repressive times.
Trophy Boys runs through July 27 at the Robert W. Wilson MCC Theater Space (511 W. 52nd St.). Evening performances are at 7 p.m. Monday, Tuesday and Thursday through Saturday, and at 6 p.m. Sunday; matinees are at 2 p.m. Saturday and 1 p.m. Sunday. For tickets and information, visit ctheater.org or call (646) 506-9393.
Playwright: Emmanuelle Mattana
Direction: Danya Taymor
Scenic Design: Matt Saunders
Costume Design: Márion Talán de la Rosa
Lighting Design: Cha See
Sound Design: Fan Zhang
