Originally published on 250 Word Reviews.

RED SPEEDO
(Off-Broadway at New York Theatre Workshop)

The intersection of fame and family – and the tremendous pressure that each can produce – animates Lucas Hnath’s Red Speedo. This ethical dissection centers around Ray (Alex Breaux), a swimmer from a poor family on the verge of achieving Michael Phelps-level stardom pending his performance in his Olympic-qualifying race. A doping scandal finds him torn between his brother/manager Peter (Lucas Caleb Rooney), coach (Peter Jay Fernandez) and disgraced ex-girlfriend/ex-physical therapist, Lydia (Zoë Winters).

As each in Ray’s orbit calculates how far they will go to take advantage of the opportunities Ray’s nascent celebrity affords them, the play teeters dangerously on the line of abstracting its characters into symbols. Hnath’s Mamet-like Wall Of Dialogue script, particularly in the play’s early scenes, doesn’t help as people make long-winded declarations at each other in exchanges that only vaguely resemble the act of conversation. When director Lileana Blain-Cruz allows the characters room to breathe (and even occasionally pause), their humanity peeks through and the play becomes more than a philosophical debate, aided by strong performances all around.

Riccardo Hernandez’s set, which includes an onstage pool, is both iconic and functional, but it’s the architecture of Alex Breaux’s superhumanly muscular body that really steals the show, occasionally to the detriment of the dialogue. Combined with Thomas Schall’s blatantly artificial fight choreography, one wonders if Blain-Cruz was aiming for BrecthianVerfremdungseffekt. If so, she falls a bit short, and we’re left puzzling over these half-characters as much as, if not more than, the ideas they suggest.

Production photo by Joan Marcus. Pictured (l-r): Zoë Winters as Lydia and Alex Breaux as Ray.