by Jesse Green
Jesse Eisenberg & Kunal Nayyar in The New Group’s ‘The Spoils’ Image: Monique Carboni
His first line is “Namaste, motherfuckers,” and the fact that he says it as a kind of greeting to his Nepalese roommate and the roommate’s Indian-American girlfriend does not make him seem any less insensitive. In fact, insensitivity is the only brilliance of Ben, at least as played by the terrifying Jesse Eisenberg in his new play, The Spoils: He has raised smartass hipster-speak to the level of a diagnosable disease. Call it ulcerative sarcasm. Ben can hardly utter a word that isn’t insincere or hostile or, on the other hand, narcissistic and maudlin — and he utters about a million words a minute whenever he’s not stoned. Eventually, the nastiness turns in on itself, but until then he’s just another entitled twentysomething filmmaker manqué living off his rich father and thinking that makes him a misunderstood genius.
He’s not; his filmmaking cred is as phony as his friendship with Kalyan, the non-swearing, dream-interpreting, too-good-to-be-true roommate he eventually betrays. (Kalyan’s in business school at NYU.) But the play’s conceit depends on such deceptions and mismatches; it’s as if Eisenberg set out to see what would happen if you took a basically cheerful sitcom, like Friends, and dropped a raving sociopath into the middle of it. What happens isn’t very nice or, alas, very good. For one thing, in order to make the set-up work in a straight-on realist dramedy, a lot of logic must be quickly abandoned. You might accept that Ben lives in a glassy, high-floor two-bedroom New York apartment with a terrace and a Jasper Johns because his father bought it for him, and you might believe (just barely) that Kalyan would put up with his pretensions and passive-aggression (“I’m a dick so you look awesome by comparison”) because he’s poor and gets to live there rent-free. But why, as the plot takes shape, do none of the other characters immediately bolt from the creepy weirdo? First there’s Kalyan’s type-A, no-bullshit girlfriend, Reshma, who to her credit does hate Ben, but hangs around anyway. Then there’s Ted, an old friend whom Ben re-encounters on the street; misunderstanding Ben’s barrage of obvious insults as humor, he responds with bromantic admiration. (“You should totally do standup.”) Finally, there’s Ted’s fiancée, Sarah, who refuses to be alienated even when Ben expresses his inappropriate love for her by sharing the single most disgusting story I’ve ever heard from a stage.
I realize that line will be an enticement for some, and perhaps even get used in an ad. (The New Group, which has produced The Spoils, has a special fondness for excretory narratives.) But I’m actually worried for Eisenberg, who is a little too good at this sort of material; after all, he wrote it for himself. The skeevy giggles, the Tourettic yips, the chest taps as if to see if his heart is still there: No one does them better. But if he has shaped the first act to provide an opportunity for displaying this catalog of expressive behaviors, what is he trying to do in the second act, which reveals Ben’s supposedly profound fantasies to be merely sick, and delivers several dramatically necessary but overdone comeuppances? The result is like watching a YouTube loop of some hapless jerk jumping into a frozen pool, over and over. Eventually you begin to wonder if the play was expressly designed to produce this series of extreme mortifications. Nor are we spared the uncomfortable hint of authorial self-flagellation when we read in a program insert that the character of Kalyan is based on a Nepalese friend of Eisenberg’s named … Kalyan. Is this a play or some kind of autoerotic mea culpa?