At one point in “Red Speedo,” the new play by Lucas Hnath currently at the New York Theatre Workshop, Ray, a competitive swimmer, tries to convince his brother Peter to help him get performance-enhancing drugs that could lead not only to Olympic gold but also to lucrative sponsorships. His justification is striking to say the least. Ray notes scientific studies which state that there is an insurmountable limit to what the body he has been given can do. Performance-enhancing drugs, he adds, is simply his form of “affirmative action.” Peter protests that there is no comparison — “one is about race, one is about physical limitations” — but Ray is having none of it: “Isn’t the color of your skin just physical?” Hnath, critically acclaimed as one of the freshest new voices in the American theater, delights in such perverse and provocative arguments. The Orlando-born playwright has said of “Red Speedo” that he was perplexed as to why the anti-doping scandals were such a big deal. “It’s a play about fairness. How do we gauge what’s fair?” he said. “Is it really as immoral as we think it is? Maybe it’s a distraction from something in our culture that is more questionable in terms of morality.”Such puckishly framed moral questions have fueled his past work, including the Playwrights Horizons production of “The Christians” — in which an evangelical pastor roils his congregation by declaring that there is no such thing as hell — as well as “A Public Reading of an Unproduced Screenplay About the Death of Walt Disney.” In the latter, presented in 2013 at the Soho Rep, the playwright deconstructed one of America’s most beloved icons as a man who, to quote Charles Isherwood in the New York Times, “exudes the casual cruelty of a kid who likes to pull the wings off flies on the playground, just for kicks.” Hnath, no doubt, will bring the same singular and maverick vision to “Hillary and Clinton,” which opens on April 1 for a one-month run at Chicago’s Victory Gardens Theater. The playwright is quick to disassociate his lead characters from the couple that is very much in the news these days — though they are infinitely recognizable. On the website of New Dramatists, an organization dedicated to nurturing emerging talent, the drama is described thus:“In an alternate universe light years away from our own is a planet called Earth. It looks a lot like our Earth, except it’s slightly different. And living on this other earth is a woman named Hillary. Hillary is trying to become the president of a country called the United States of America. It’s 2008 and she’s campaigning in a state called Iowa. She’s not doing very well in the polls. She needs more money to keep the campaign going, so she calls her husband for help. He offers her a deal, a tough deal, but when she gets his help, she gets more than she bargained for.”What is also included on the site is an excerpt from the play that sounds familiar indeed. Hillary recounts for Bill his serial infidelities, which, at first, make her cry. But that’s the end of her self-pity — for good. “I don’t cry,” she tells her husband. “I keep it together. No matter what, I keep it together. Because the moment you break, that’s when they’ll say you’re weak, and the moment they say you’re weak, that’s when you lose.”In their striving to win, Hillary and Ray have a great deal in common. While Hnath does not shy away from examining the corrupting influence that the American dream can have on its devotees, he also has a great affection for his characters and sympathy for their ambitious goals, whatever the means they use to attain them. The cost is apparent, at least it is in “Red Speedo.” In the play, Ray (Alex Breaux in a star-making performance) says to Peter (Lucas Caleb Rooney), “I’m tired of winning.” Somehow one can’t imagine Hillary Clinton espousing such a sentiment either in Hnath’s political fantasia or in real life.“Red Speedo” continues at New York Theatre Workshop through April 3.
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