‘Speedo’ makes a serious splash
Inane swimmer’s story earns gold
The problem with American capitalism isn’t merely that it esteems self-interest above all else. As depicted in Lucas Hnath’s “Red Speedo,” it also makes us think we can and should reach the pinnacle of human achievement, whatever the cost. In a supposed meritocracy, if you don’t come out on top in your goals as a lawyer or an Olympic swimmer, whom can you blame but yourself ?
Those are the respective trades of brothers Peter (Gabriel Marin) and Ray (Max Carpenter) in the Center Rep Bay Area premiere, which I saw Wednesday, Jan. 31. The smart, pulpy new play, equal parts comedy, drama and thriller, opens with a dazzling display of professional commitment in a poolside pow-
wow.
Peter is trying to persuade Coach (Michael Asberry) to breach professional ethics and keep quiet about the discovery of performance-enhancing drugs in the swim team’s communal fridge. Lead swimmer Ray might get tainted by association, jeoparding his lucrative sponsorship deal with Speedo and Peter’s cut of it.
Peter’s skill isn’t so much watertight argument or sparkling legal oratory. His monologue is peppered with fragments, tangents, placeholders that stall while he cobbles together his next scrap of thought, ideas launched with gusto but then promptly left dangling.
What staggers, rather, is Peter’s total abasement before his quest. This is a man who will say anything, everything, who pawned his last shred of dignity long ago. Yet Marin’s masterful performance — worth the price of admission in the first few minutes alone — shades in a whole life within that single, desperate bit of wheedling. He is alternately self-congratulatory, then boyishly lost in his own terror of squandered opportunity, then tentatively threatening, as if any counter might expose his gambit as bluff.
Still, Peter and everyone else in “Red Speedo,” directed incisively by Markus Potter, are unshakably, congenitally convinced that they deserve to win. Ray and Coach crave the Olympic gold. Peter yearns for enough money to send his daughter not to a “free school” but to “an expensive school.” Ray’s ex Lydia (Rosie Hallett) knows she ought to have won a legal battle over her license as a sports therapist, despite the fact that she knowingly broke the law for profit.
Ray’s inane lines are funny just on the page — there’s practically a song in his reliance on the word “like” — but Carpenter adds to Ray (who wears only the swimsuit of the title for the whole show) a total ownership of the character’s vacuity. He delivers his drivel like it’s the surest, most important language ever spoken. Hallett is so shifty as Lydia that you expect fresh schemes to tumble out of the pockets of her hoodie. If Asberry can be wooden as Coach, so often reverting to an armsakimbo stance that the move looks mechanical, his character’s also underwritten. Hnath makes him stand as a pillar of integrity and compassion without the moral qualms that make the rest of the quartet so dynamic.
Those stiff moments pass quickly, though. It’s not a spoiler to say that all the characters in “Red Speedo” win, because they win what they don’t really want. The cost to enter the race, to play the game, makes winning worthless — as cheap as a novelty piece of brightcolored spandex.