Squaring Up the Winners and Losers
The “On the Boards” production of Winners and Losers performed on April 25, 2014 in Seattle is, in essence, a conversation between two friends that reaches a jarringly honest and personal crescendo where the line between improvised and scripted performance blurs. Written and performed by James Long and Marcus Youssef, under the direction of Chris Abraham, the play is woven around the eponymous game Winners and Losers, during which the two characters take turns listing people, objects, places, and so on, to pronounce them as either winners or losers. What begins as a tête-à-tête of playful banter between two closely acquainted individuals quickly unravels itself as an interaction that asks how far and in what depth are we willing to probe politics of personal pridelections. Winners and Losers challenges its audience to explore how likes and dislikes are deeply entrenched in constructions of self, recollections of histories and explorations of privilege.
The production opens with the characters introducing themselves to the audience as Jamie and Marcus followed by Jamie’s announcement that this is “Winners and Losers.” With this itself, they recognize the audience as part of the game, almost a third conversant. This renders the viewer of the filmed production a non-conversant observer that the characters/writers/performers are unaware of. Seated on either side of a table, on the utterly pared down stage, Jamie and Marcus reason as to why hipsters, Canada, Stephen Hawkings among other things, are losers or winners. While Marcus determines that the first nations of Canada are losers given the impoverished state they are in now, Jamie, in partial agreement, declares them winners “on the moral high ground.” The banter during the initial determinations recedes as slippery slopes and ad hominems populate the game. Jamie ridicules Marcus for representing himself as “worldly-wise” for it absents an honest acceptance of his class privilege. In response, Marcus accuses Jamie of being threatened by the very prospect of vulnerability and weakness. The arguments bring up the thorniness of self-fashioning: what parts of ourselves would we rather veil and what parts of others would we want to unveil for the sake of desirable self-definition?
Winners and Losers is indelible in how it allows its audience to be the bystanders of a seemingly private interaction between James Long and Marcus Youssef themselves. The meta-theatrical references to their acting careers and their performance resumes, along with the reference to Marcus’ rich immigrant father and James’ recollections of drunken “first-nation jokes,” create an utter confusion about the line between what is authentic and what is theatrical. As these lines blur, the cruel competition between Jamie and Marcus, uncomfortable, yet intrigued by the possibility of this being a “true” conversation. In the case of the twice removed audience of the recorded production, such viewing becomes almost voyeuristic and surveillant. For me, watching a seemingly real(time) argument between two friends through a screen during a post-pandemic space-time when various publics have had to merge through technologies, felt strangely familiar.
It is poignant that throughout, Jamie and Marcus stay within a chalk square they draw on the dark stage floor at the very beginning of the play. Reminiscent of Brecht’s The Caucasian Chalk Circle, the chalk square is a reminder of the momentariness and theatricality of the competition between the two individuals. Conversely, such purpose is rendered useless as Jamie and Marcus tear each other apart in realistic cruelty reflecting the politics of biases that go beyond the metaphorical chalk squares drawn in everyday life.