The Submission

Lucille Lortel Theatre

New York

(212) 352-3101

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“Throw in a hot-button subject, add a couple of stars with cool television credentials, and voilà, you have a marketable play,” said Ben Brantley in The New York Times. One suspects this was the mind-set of the producers who took on Jeff Talbott’s playwriting debut—“a perky tale of racial pride and prejudice in the theater”—and recruited Glee’s Jonathan Groff and True Blood’s Rutina Wesley as the leads. Granted, this four-person play contains a “streak of self-awareness,” allowing Talbott to wink at the theater-industry cynicism that benefited him. Still, “an artificial sheen” taints this story of a gay playwright who uses an African-American–sounding pseudonym to get his play produced, making its central conflict unengaging.

That depends on “your willingness to ignore the play’s implausibilities,” said Jesse Oxfeld in The New York Observer. True, it’s hard to believe anyone would think the “faux-black-actor scheme” is a good idea or that playwright Danny (Groff) would recruit Emilie (Wesley) to stand in for him as the fictional Shaleeha G’ntamobi. Nevertheless, “there are real ideas at play here—the limits of political correctness, the value of competing claims of victimhood—and they’re confronted by real characters” whose deep-seated prejudices gradually bubble to the surface.

This is “what white American writers of a certain age” like to think of as “An Incendiary Story About Race,” said Scott Brown in New York. Like David Mamet’s Race and the 2004 movie Crash, The Submission preaches that ours is a divided society hamstrung by political correctness and that “only a cathartic word-letting can correct the repression.” That Danny and Emilie eventually call each other the N-word and the F-word is no shocker—the audience has been “waiting for it all night long.” If only Talbott had realized that “radioactive words are no merit badge of bravery.” In his universe, prejudices even out and no oppressor is worse than another. The real world, unfortunately, contains genuine injustice that’s less neatly resolved.