Straight White Men: Yep, that’s what it’s about…sort of

Playwright/director Young Jean Lee is the Madonna of experimental theater, constantly reinventing herself. You could see her 2011 cabaret act We’re Gonna Die and her 2012 dance piece Untitled Feminist Show and never know they were authored by the same person. This also applies to Lee’s Straight White Men, now making its New York premiere at the Public Theater. Appropriately, this living room drama about white men takes place in a white living room (designed by David Evans Morris): The carpet is white; the furniture is white; the closets and walls are white. But wait…is that a black nativity scene on the mantel? Perhaps these aren’t the straight white men that launched a thousand Internet think pieces about whom you’ve heard so much. Jake (Gary Wilmes), Drew (Pete Simpson), and Matt (James Stanley) are adult brothers, returned for Christmas to the home of their father, Ed (Austin Pendleton, playing this role more convincingly than most dads on TV). As they wait for Ed and Matt to arrive with the Christmas tree, Jake (a banker) and Drew (a professor) play a round of “Privilege,” a Monopoly board that their parents repurposed to teach their three white sons about the inherent privilege they enjoy in the United States of America. (A typical card in the “chance” pile calls on its holder to pay $200 in reparations for the crime of claiming, “I don’t see race.”) Seeing the open board game on his coffee table, Ed asks his sons with a chuckle, “How else were you gonna learn not to be assholes?”