“Am I awful?” Ben asks in the New Group’s The Spoils.
Kalyan (Kunal Nayyar), his kindhearted roommate, pauses before responding. “Hmm. Let me think for one moment.” Then he pauses again.
“Take your time, buddy,” says Ben.
Kalyan doesn’t really need to ponder on this one. Ben is a character written and played by Jesse Eisenberg, who specializes in the spiteful, the spineless, the arrogant, the obnoxious, the self-aggrandizing and the not exactly self-aware. He likes to see if he can make horrible men just a little worse, while still somehow invoking pity. You can see variations of this role in The Double, Now You See Me, The Social Network, Adventureland, The Squid and the Whale and particularly in his two earlier plays, in which he also starred, Asuncion and The Revisionist.
Eisenberg is an able writer and an effective, if somewhat delimited, performer. He offers jokes and speeches that actors like to play and audiences like to wince at. He is a skilled practitioner of the comedy of mortification, and it’s a wonder he can speak at all for all the feet in his mouth.
So that’s the good part, and it’s very good. The bad part is that Eisenberg is not particularly practiced at structure. He piles on insult and humiliation and calamity and eventually strands himself at the top of that pile. He handled the resolution better in The Revisionist, helped by Vanessa Redgrave’s centering presence, but The Spoils just doesn’t know what to do with itself at the end.
And while Eisenberg does know what to do with himself, you wonder just how many variations he can work on the narcissistic, entitled man-child. The Spoils is his funniest play yet, but if you’ve seen the earlier ones then it seems too derivative of his earlier performances and writing.
Ben is a weed-smoking layabout living rent-free in the plush apartment his father bought him. He’s been expelled by the graduate program in film at NYU, though judging by the little footage we see, the question is less why they kicked him out than why they admitted him in the first place. Out of loneliness or boredom or the need to lord his privilege over someone poorer and browner, he has taken in Kalyan, a sweetie-pie Nepalese immigrant studying at the business school. (Kalyan is apparently based on an actual friend of Eisenberg’s – it’s genuinely nice to know that in real life he has them – and there’s a note in the program inviting you to donate to earthquake relief.)
Complications arise when Ben runs into Ted (Michael Zegen), an old elementary school acquaintance, and learns that he is marrying Sarah (Erin Darke), the girl of Ben’s prepubescent dreams. That Ben is still obsessed with a girl he knew before the onset of secondary sexual characteristics suggests some pretty stark emotional limitations. Ben’s radical misanthropy, fat bank account and general laziness prevent him from growing up and forming adult relationships.
“I think I had a bad childhood when I was younger,” Ben says in his defense. “No,” says Sarah. “I was there. You didn’t.” It’s a good line – Eisenberg has a lot of them – though eventually you start to wonder if the play’s preoccupation with childhood and adolescence hints at some writerly limitations, too. It might be time for Eisenberg to write a few more grownups.
Still, if you can leave aside questions of story and character – and because the director Scott Elliott is quite adept and because he has assembled a wholly charming cast, for a long time you can – The Spoils has a lot to offer: wordplay, moral outrage, a wealth of cringe humor. But eventually the engine of the plot sputters and the world comes to seem dreary and narrow. This is a comedy that’s gone off.
