InterAct Theatre's 'Straight White Men': Asking tough questions about privilege

Straight white men are angry and will surely continue their rage - based on centuries of privilege - if Korean-born, New York City playwright and experimental theater company CEO Young Jean Lee has any prescience.

Her play Straight White Men - a dramedy of fathers, sons, Christmas holidays, and identity politics - opens this week, performed at the Drake by the InterAct Theatre Company, with local director Matt Pfeiffer.

As a straight white man himself, Pfeiffer doesn't believe Lee is indicting anyone here, yet he does agree that her moral microscope is sensitive.

"She's genuinely asking, 'What do we want white men to do now, to be now?' " says Pfeiffer. "I'm comfortable with the microscope aspect: Privilege that comes from being a straight white man is worthy of scrutiny." (We might bear in mind that the motto of Lee's own theater company is "Destroy the audience.")

Lee is known for weirdly comic, edgily uncomfortable work that examines America through the lens of identity politics, focusing archly on how minorities have forever been mistreated. Targets include the manners and means by which we look at Asian Americans (Groundwork for Metaphysics of the Morals) and African Americans (The Shipment), with indigenous Americans and feminists as frequent examples.

"I'm not actively interested in destroying anyone," the calm, collected Pfeiffer says with a laugh. "Nor do I think that's her intent. I'm comfortable with provoking, though, asking tough questions with immediacy."

In Straight White Men, Lee looks at a progressive, all-male family dynamic. The play is linear, naturalistic, cool, clear. "Her topic would be so much easier to skewer if these were a bunch of right-wing, Trump-loving, white men," Pfeiffer says. "But what fuels Lee is a more subtly shaded exploration of the straight white man's psychology - not some black-and-white cliché."

Lee wants to know how men behave - how they are forced to make choices rather than take their social status for granted - in the current universe of changing racial positions, sexual dynamics, and gender identification. "I think she's fascinated by the fact that this group of people now actually has to identify," says Pfeiffer.

Another straight white man, InterAct artistic director Seth Rozin, who chose the play and director, says Straight White Men has a surprising goal: "to provoke us to consider the myriad ways privilege not only benefits this demographic, but how it can define and limit one's life choices as well, even when one makes a concerted effort to eschew and even combat that privilege."

This is not as aggressive as some of the playwright's other efforts, but it is more subtle and subversive. So it's actually more of a challenge for the director and his actors, Dan Kern, Kevin Meehan, Steven Rishard, and Tim Dugan Jr.

"With that, I need the actors to play the reality of the situation, and let the aggressiveness be a by-product of that action," Pfeiffer says. It's Christmas, a home setting, an occasion on which people's true selves often are revealed, with all the holiday "breakdowns" and "goofing that brothers do," in Pfeiffer's words. And with very high stakes.

Rozin likes what emerges, less-explored dimensions of privilege - such as unconscious comfort with leadership, or absence of concern about being profiled insidiously. Or the unexpected issue of dispensing with privilege. "What happens when one can't - or chooses not to - live up to the expectations of success, achievement, and behavior that come with being straight, white, and male?" asks Rozin, noting how each member of the family proves his privilege in anxious, individual ways. "This is what Lee's three brothers and their father grapple with."