Marcus Youssef and James Long make us all feel really uncomfortable at Soho Rep

You may question if you’re even seeing a scripted play at all in Marcus Youssef and James Long’s Winners and Losers, now making its New York debut at Soho Rep. Much of the dialogue feels improvised. There’s no costume designer. The two actors (Youssef and Long) refer to each other by their real names, dredging up painfully personal details about each other’s real lives and scattering them on stage. After several iterations of TV’s Big Brother and Real Housewives, have we finally arrived at the age of Reality Theater? Of course, Youssef and Long’s repartee is a lot more astute than anything you’re likely to hear on Bravo, even though it springs from a highly reductive premise. The setup resembles that of a game show or half hour of punditry on CNN. The two Canadian theater-makers sit at opposite ends of a long wooden table. One brings up a topic and they immediately begin to debate whether that thing is, in the grand scheme of things, a “winner” or “loser.” Mexico: loser. Goldman Sachs: winner. The two men are divided on Occupy Wall Street, with Long declaring the movement a loser for failing to prompt any real reforms and Youssef calling it a winner for changing the vocabulary of wealth inequality. Youssef pivots, “Stephen Hawking: That’s a good one, eh?” Both men agree that the world-famous cosmologist is a winner. Youssef and Long are highly intelligent and have the ability to jump from topic to topic at lightning speed, leaving your mind swimming. They’re also very funny and seem to genuinely enjoy their back-and-forth. In fact, through their humor and smiles you might not notice their genial Canadian politeness slowly morphing into something a lot more vicious.