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88identitypoliticsARMIE HAMMER IS A STRAIGHT WHITE MAN who madea name for himself playing such big-screen paragons ofstraight white manhood as The Social Network’s Winklevosstwins and the Lone Ranger. He went on, of course, to growas an actor and cement his stardom playing a non-straightwhite man, opposite Timothée Chalamet, in last year’s CallMe by Your Name. Now he’s returning to type—and makinghis Broadway debut—in Young Jean Lee’s hilarious, scathing,and mournful play Straight White Men, which opens thismonth under the auspices of Second Stage at the HayesTheater. Hammer trained as a theatrical actor but neverpursued a career on the stage—so why now?“The easy answer is that it scared me,” he says. “I’ve cometo realize that the point of life is not to be comfortable—youshould be in some sort of discomfort and pain at any givenmoment because that’s the only way to grow, as an actor andas a person. Plus, the play is so brilliant and prescient andtimely—it deals so well with the concepts of toxic masculinityand white privilege, which we’re finally reckoning with as asociety. And I thought, Not only will I get to push myselfand do a play on Broadway but I’ll also get to be part ofsomething that really has something to say.”A theatrical shape-shifter with impeccable downtowncredentials, Lee is making her own Broadway debut as aplaywright—the first Asian American woman, straight orotherwise, to do so. For the last decade and a half she hasbeen writing and staging works that are bold, experimental,spiky, genre-bending, and, above all, wildly imaginativeand entertaining. Mainstream she ain’t—her plays havetaken on Korean American identity politics (Songs of theDragons Flying to Heaven), female identity politics (UntitledFeminist Show), and black identity politics (The Shipment),along with the patriarchy (Lear) and mortality (We’re Gon-na Die)—but with Straight White Men she has written aconventionally plot-driven work``````DOW NTOW N THEATR ICALSH A PE-SHIFTER YOUNG JE A N LEEMAK ES HER BROADWAY DEBUTWITH STR A IGHT W HITE MEN,STA R R ING A R MIE HA MMER.BY ADAM GR EEN. PHOTOGR APHEDBY A NNIE LEIBOV ITZ.``````CONTINUED ON PAGE 1 23