curtain call

Gay besties get brutally honest in ‘Rough Trade’

The cast of the Off-Broadway play Rough Trade
Max Kantor, left, and Derek Christopher Murphy in ‘Rough Trade.’ Photo by Hunter Canning

The Rundown

Aspiring artists Bunting (Remy Germinario) and Finch (Derek Christopher Murphy) live together in Washington Heights, supporting each other through miserable day jobs, creative stasis, and drunken nights at New York City’s legendary gay dive bar 9th Avenue Saloon. But when Finch starts dating Hawk (Max Kantor), a “finance bro” who works for a pharmaceutical company, Bunting is enraged by a choice he considers far beneath his friend. Meanwhile, Bunting navigates an open relationship with Cock (Gabriel Neumann), but his new boyfriend is keeping a big secret. Rough Trade dives into the vicious, insular, and occasionally loving world of gay New York with startling honesty.

No Tea, No Shade

Two men wait for the subway in the Off-Broadway play Rough Trade
Derek Christopher Murphy and Max Kantor in ‘Rough Trade.’ Photo by Hunter Canning

Rough Trade is a ferociously funny new work, unforgiving in its assessment of New York’s toxic gay community. If it were just a savage satire, it would be a hilarious and worthwhile one. But Kev Berry’s excellent play, which runs Off-Broadway at The Tank through April 8, goes deeper as it progresses. He finds complex humanity in four disparate gay men and, in tracing their doomed fumblings toward love and connection, hits on intractable fissures which have divided the gay community for decades on end. 

At the play’s center is fast-talking Bunting, a heavy drinker with tough principles. His friendship with Finch began, like so many queer bonds, with a hook-up. Germinario and Murphy find a lived-in chemistry, loving but tinged with unresolved sexual tension. Their eventual fights crackle with intensity because, in the end, both parties are correct — Finch rightly resents his friend’s high-minded jabs but also knows that he has made compromises for the sake of easy comforts. 

Kantor is side-splittingly hilarious as dim-witted finance bro Hawk, a kind figure with hints of a darker edge. Neumann gets less to work with as Cock (and is saddled with a baffling character name) but does suggest a haunted quality under surface sweetness. Alex Tobey’s bare-bones staging is sharp and focused, lending shape to a piece that could easily get lost in its many monologues and screaming matches (there’s one too many of each). 

Berry is brutal with his characters but never mocking. Of course, they’re often ridiculous, but Rough Trade treats these millennial gays with the same weight and seriousness as a Joe Pitt (Angels in America) or Ned Weeks (The Normal Heart), even if — as Bunting might be apt to yell—some of them might not even recognize those names. If the play sags in its final scenes, it’s straining only under the weight of Berry’s ambition. An 11 o’clock knockdown drag out between all four characters (together for the first time at, where else, Sunday brunch) throws a few too many final turns at the audience, including a discourse on kink that’s too complex to be tossed in last minute. But ambition is better than easy snark, any day. 

Let’s Have a Moment

Two men sit at a restaurant in the Off-Broadway play Rough Trade
Max Kantor, left, and Derek Christopher Murphy in ‘Rough Trade.’ Photo by Hunter Canning

Roughly midway through Rough Trade, Berry slows down to allow space for a quiet, moving pair of scenes depicting the two central couples spending a quiet evening together. Bunting admires a new drawing Cock has finished, depicting his backyard in Nicaragua from early childhood, and Hawk tries to help Finch think out a sculpture by patiently talking through his process. 

These companion scenes are simple and sweet — on the surface, nothing special. Yet that is, in itself, what makes them special: two moments of comfy queer happiness, just that, nothing more. You forget, until you see it, just how rare that is.

The Last Word

A man helps someone off the ground in the Off-Broadway production of Rough Trade
Remy Germinario, left, and Gabriel Neumann in ‘Rough Trade.’ Photo by Hunter Canning

Rough Trade is rough around the edges, an ambitious work that bites off more than it can chew. Yet it is nonetheless a witty and deeply affecting work of queer art and, in approaching the lives and concerns of contemporary young gay men with total sincerity, remains a rare kind of story on contemporary stages.

Rough Trade plays Off-Broadway at The Tank through April 8.

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