The Bad Guys is better than it seems. Noah (James McMenamin) is a rising director who has made a film about a high-school pal who was mixed up in murder; returned to his idyllic hometown in upstate New York, he finds himself in a zone of testy, testosterone-skewed half-friendships. Alena Smith’s drama about sticky male bonding asks pertinent questions regarding the judgments we make about one another: when certain things (from violence and drugs to loyalty and honesty) are considered appropriate, and when they are deemed to have crossed a line. In Smith’s script, these lines are often cleverly drawn, but onstage they fuzz up in all the wrong ways.
Hal Brooks’s befuddled production for Second Stage puts The Bad Guys in the unenviable position of being an ensemble play about old acquaintances in which much of the cast seems not to have met. Only the gifted Tobias Segal, as a weedy local drug dealer with a tattoo on his neck and chips on his shoulder, appears at home in the world of the play; the others come off as either miscast or misdirected. (Something about the McGinn/Cazale Theatre seems to magnify moments of overacting; it is set up for high scrutiny.) Most damaging is McMenamin, who was appealingly blank in David Cromer’s Our Town, but whose ultra-passive performance here is vacuous in the literal sense: It sucks The Bad Guys’ energy into a theatrical no-man’s-land.—Adam Feldman
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