Red Speedo is an experiment in compression. The plot of Lucas Hnath’s play develops over some twenty-four hours, as one swimmer’s Olympic hopes—and the fates of his brother and coach who have pinned their own futures on his Olympic success—unfold. A place on the team means more than a minute-long race on the world stage, of course: it’s a shot at recognition, for money, for a different future for all three men. It means something different for the woman who enters the play a bit later, but the stakes are immediate and unstable for her as well.
Hnath’s language is likewise compressed, playing out in a succession of sentence fragments and dashes as his characters improvise, amend, and occasionally misrepresent their thoughts. Written in arias of argument punctuated by rapid-fire exchanges, this speech is alive to the dual impulses of self-invention and self-delusion. The effect is direct, quite funny, and propulsive.
This distillation—a man, a public arena, twenty-four hours to face his fate—borrows from an ancient form. “The Greeks offer an elegant structure to steal from,” says Hnath. “A charged controversy is dropped into the room and both sides come at it; it’s an unparalleled way to frame public debate. It also functions as a kind of empathy gymnasium, where you find yourself aligning with people and ideas you wouldn’t normally agree with.”
Hnath’s play interrogates the ethics of using performance-enhancing drugs: is there really a moral argument against taking synthetic testosterone to compete against an athlete with higher naturally occurring levels of the hormone or other genetic endowments? The play expands this investigation to consider the idea of fairness itself, the ways the rhetoric of equality can mask any number of self-serving impulses. What do we believe we’re fairly owed, and what will we sacrifice in its pursuit? Written and staged like an athletic event, Red Speedo is a sharp and stylish take on the darker sides of the American dream of a level playing field—and of leveling the field yourself.