The Bad Guys
Opening Night: June 4, 2012
Closing: June 17, 2012
Theater: McGinn
Five childhood buddies reunite on a late summer afternoon for some beer, grilling and weed, but deep within their friendship lurk ghosts that rock the patio beneath them. Bitingly comic and ruthlessly recognizable, this is the story of a generation at war with itself over what it means to "man up."
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June 6, 2012
As you watch “The Bad Guys,” an absorbing one-act comedy-drama by Alena Smith at the McGinn/Cazale Theater, your opinion of just which characters should be classified as miscreants may shift from scene to scene. The cocky investment banker would seem a natural candidate, right? Hedge funds! Cue the booing and hissing. But then his loyalty to a childhood friend whose life has unraveled earns some sympathy. The drug dealer who freely admits to selling to kids certainly appears to qualify, at least until the moving speech in which he reveals that his illicit trade is the only bulwark between his extended family and abject poverty.
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June 4, 2012
“Action is eloquence,” says a character in “The Bad Guys,” Alena Smith’s tiresome look at the state of manhood in 2012. Smith ignores his wisdom, opting instead for a stream of words that moves farther and farther away from the eloquence for which she strains. Hal Brooks directs with a heavy hand (though it’s probably not possible to coax realistic deliveries of lines such as “Why do I feel like I’m sealing my own doom?”)
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June 5, 2012
A possible murder and cover-up, the war in Iraq, drug sales to children, the government bailout of Wall Street, and the fractures that erupt amongst friends and family are a few of the issues that playwright Alena Smith has crammed into The Bad Guys, now at the McGinn/Cazale Theatre as part of Second Stage’s Uptown series of new works. But at a scant running time of 80 minutes, the work feels both overstuffed and underdeveloped.
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June 7, 2012
Some plays can stretch a tiny plot for hours. They finally grind to a halt, and you’re still wondering what the heck they were trying to say. And then there’s Alena Smith’s “The Bad Guys”: At a mere 90 minutes, it has enough ideas and potential story lines to fill five plays. This Second Stage Uptown production is too scattered, but it’s also often insightful, and far from boring.
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June 4, 2012
Helmer Hal Brooks and his design collaborators made some odd choices on the casting and presentation of Smith’s characters, so it’s a challenge just to identify them. And for reasons known only to the playwright, the people who matter most in the story never appear onstage.
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