In playwright Kev Berry’s note in the program for his play Rough Trade, he writes, “As [the four characters] I hope you gays in the audience find yourself looking in a mirror reflecting back your imperfection, your love, your hope, your rage.” Both leads, best friends and roommates Bunting (Remy Germinario) and Finch (Derek Chris Murphy), are artists of the aspiring variety—the former a painter and the latter a sculptor.
Both of their love interests, Cock (Gabriel Neumann) and Hawk (Max Kantor), have secrets. Both make money in ways that are litigated over and over again. Rough Trade’s structure is such that meet cute (between the two leads and the audience) follows meet cute (between Bunting and Cock) follows meet cute (between Finch and Hawk), and then dates, conversations that become arguments that sometimes become reconciliations, and so on—a mirror of a mirror of a mirror, all warped and endless, meant to be some accusatory abyss.
Rough Trade is just short of literalizing Berry’s fixation with mirroring with a looming Hal Prince-approved looking glass in front of the audience. But if you’re going to sell us an unflattering reflection of ourselves, that glass better be so sharp, so clear, and so finely crafted you wouldn’t want to look back at yourself in anything else.
And that’s the goal here, right? That is, a righteous reflection of what it is to be a young metropolitan gay person today, deeply concerned with social justice, personal and political enrichment, and a level of self-awareness for our flaws that is just inches beyond reproach. Hyper-articulate, overeducated, and extremely mean, coated in enough irony to pass off as wit. The only lexicon that’s important is the culturally and socially informed one. That’s what it means to be a young gay metropolitan today. Audiences are supposed to, as they say, “feel seen.”
Perhaps now is the time for that kind of work, some kind of balance between the prosaic and the visceral, when the landscape for a lot of bigger gay things mostly flatters our looks. Broadly speaking, even the most poison-penned satire of gay people has a whiff of the endearing, like The Other Two or, yeah, even Bros. But they’re not interested in a kind of quasi-ugly truth that Berry wants to explore, especially when it comes to money.
There are so many passes at mirrors in Rough Trade, without any of them being literal, that you could accuse the show of being uncanny. A monologue mirrors one by Tony Kushner, a dialogue chunk by Matthew Lopez, a scene structure by Sarah DeLappe. And, of course, this is a trap—this critic’s recognition of the more macro references beyond the Big Bang Theory-style of clogging them into the dialogue. Because, then, I’m also, in a sense, still supposed to be looking in the same mirror. I’m judgmental and I use my knowledge and pop-cultural fluency as a weapon, my politics are sometimes curated to spare my ego, and my resentments are piss-poor ways to create connection, but delicious ways to enact a mental hierarchy or food chain.
Why, then, does the reflection seem so unnatural and arch throughout Rough Trade? Bunting and Finch vaguely resemble best friends in a codependent relationship, and the fights they have about money and personal values and jealousy sound vaguely like real conversations, and they talk kind of like people I know and surround myself with. Yet, as the animosity between the two boils and Berry lets his characters take the bad-faith route toward dramaturgy, the characters seldom resemble humans who care about one another. They don’t feel like people who claim enough self-awareness to navigate the change in dynamic in a way where they’re privy to the very politics of friendship itself, gay or otherwise. The internal character logic, rather than articulate the fragile complexity of these dynamics, folds back in on itself in an artificial way.
In Rough Trade, there’s just shouting and grandstanding, just the posturing of politics, and seldom the more delicate and sensitive ways that these politics shape our interpersonal interactions. Those dynamics have subtle gradations which gradually poison a relationship.
It feels too much like a facsimile of awful people than real awful people, the performances across the board conspicuous. But nothing about Alex Tobey’s direction—which is stodgy, both misusing and underusing a plain white backdrop and projection—suggests a more heightened, acrobatically satirical framing. Nor does it seem keyed into a campy gaze of histrionics, the dissolution pushed to operatic heights. This is ostensibly verisimilitude, documentary.
Bunting’s cultural and political self-regard are supposed to be real; Finch’s submission to finally letting someone care for him and his work is supposed to be familiar; and their inevitable fallout is supposed to be like a phantom pain. For those privy to the gay metropolitan experience, we’re meant to recognize these characters and be over-familiar with their every gesture and cadence.
We’re supposed to have their problems, too, and maybe we do. But in lieu of a real exercise in self-reflexivity, the liminal spaces that the characters get trapped in are kind of nostalgic, even as it points out the toxic comfort of nostalgia (yes, a monologue is given about Stephen Sondheim’s Follies). Its hyper-referentiality and its fairly overt lifting from other works (a dash of Edward Albee here, a sprinkle of Mart Crowley there) aren’t (re)arranged in such a way as to examine and deconstruct the “gay play” as it has morphed over time.
Where Fake Friends’s work in Circle Jerk bounces around apparatuses and modes to give us a demented perversion of the gay play, Rough Trade’s paradoxical inward anxiety and aggressive confidence about its identity feels unimaginative. It becomes increasingly unclear why, in this small window into these people’s lives and this particular play, what the function of that referentiality is. Besides being their native tongue, it doesn’t feel like the ocean of namedrops, except being initially established as a barometer of in-the-know-ness, indicates anything other than that. It doesn’t feel like these are things, these mosaic points of iconography, that indicate enrichment, love, curiosity, or even Adorno-style culture industry malaise.
What’s frustrating about Rough Trade is that it skims and skids on and around interesting ideas: redemption in the age of essentialism, the possibility of real change and growth, proximity to power, self-righteousness as self-destructive, gayness and arrested development, the uncertain future of gay art (including the very medium that you’re watching), selling out in these times, sublimated desires and violence, and on and so on. A good version of this work is in sight, but it’s not there, as the play is hampered by both a lack of focus and a noxious condescension that’s left both unchecked and, ironically, uninterrogated.
It would be one thing if Bunting, who’s defined by his moral character and drinking, were telling us something we didn’t know or telling us something we did know but better than anyone else, but he’s not. And the play’s skepticism of his trustworthiness as some kind of moral compass is void of the complexity required to have your gay virtue signaler and condemn him too. Humanity is obfuscated by cleverness. Berry regurgitates Twitter thread talking points, without really finding the musicality of gay speech and transforming it into rhythmic dialogue, much less a more compelling ideological angle, and Tobey doesn’t so much stage the dialogue as he just sticks actors on a stage to speak it. And despite affecting ideological ambivalence, too much of the text and tone fails to sheath its narrower point of view. The show is its own echo chamber.
There’s a richness to gay homosociality, and the ways it has been depicted in the theater, that Rough Trade seems interested in talking about but disinterested in actually honing as a theatrical experience. The clumsiness with which queer people stick to their political guns, the tonal whiplash of a friend interaction, and the particular imprint that those relationships can have as people who occupy a precarious and changing degree of marginality and visibility. And the ambition to continue to tinker with its evolving linguistic and cultural impulses, derived from well-trod templates, isn’t without merit. After all, who doesn’t love an evening of booze-fueled barbs, and from cool and hip queens, no less?
What makes such works as Boys in the Band, Fire Island, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, Circle Jerk, and Angels in America successful isn’t only their truth but their sense of theatricality: the transformation of time and space to inhabit something live and truthful and surprising. A mirror. Rough Trade is written in such a manner that it sounds just enough like good playwriting—loquacious, up to date, with glimmers of insight and cresting moxie—that it’s easily mistaken for it. Yet no subject has its depths plumbed, no character really challenges the audience in a novel way, and its presentation saps the excitement of its liveness. The show seems content with the glittery pleasure of quips allegedly pruned to be their sharpest.
But ultimately the problem is that if any of these broken shards are supposed to cut deep and reveal something, Rough Trade just gives us a surface with the bleary image of some people who might sorta look and sorta sound like some gay people you know, but also not quite.
Rough Trade is now running at the Tank.
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