U.S. Drag

GIFT OF THE MAD GUY Marshall-Green gives Joyce a copy of his book.

Photograph: Richard Termine

Armed only with fresh looks, spoiled attitudes and high-honors degrees from a Seven Sisters college, best friends Angela (the wry Joyce) and Allison (the nervy Fischer) have come to New York looking to make things happen—or rather, looking for things to happen to them. The distinction between those two ideas is at the heart of Gina Gionfriddo’s U.S. Drag, a witty, intellectually engaging exploration of what it means to make one’s way in the world. (“It isn’t fair!” complains Allison in her version of a cri de coeur. “I don’t have any money and no one knows who I am!”)

Gionfriddo’s central thematic concern—the link between personal and mass hysteria—is elaborated through interlocking plots: Angela’s relationship with Christian (a hilariously self-indulgent Marshall-Green), the best-selling author of a pseudoautobiography titled Breaking the Boy; Allison’s determination to reinvent herself in a more marriageable mold; an earnest community-activist organization, S.A.F.E. (Stay Away From Ed), that aims to protect people from a mysterious criminal who has been attacking Good Samaritans. (The group’s motto: “Don’t help.”) Trip Cullman’s astute direction for stageFARM draws compellingly heightened comedic performances from the cast, which includes Matthew Stadelmann as a hypertense Wall Street trader and Audrey Lynn Weston as a lonely assault victim, and the play succeeds as light satire. But just behind the polished, ultra-articulate surface of Gionfriddo’s writing is the rumbling of a larger question: our secret agency in the operations of the world.

—Adam Feldman