If there were an award for Most Unpleasant Character in a Play, the male lead of Jeff Talbott’s willfully provocative “The Submission” would win in a landslide. It’s not often you see a show revolving around a guy you want to slap.
He is smug, entitled Danny (Jonathan Groff, from “Spring Awakening” and “Glee”), an aspiring playwright fresh out of Yale.
Despite his pedigree, Danny can’t get his work produced. “I thought this would be much easier,” he complains to his best friend, the sweet-tempered Trevor (Will Rogers).
One day, the Humana Festival accepts Danny’s latest play, about African-American kids in the projects. Only problem is, he submitted it under the name Shaleeha G’”ntamobi. Undaunted, Danny hires a black actress, Emilie (Rutina Wesley, from “True Blood”), to pose as the author until the show opens.
The basic plot recalls some famous hoaxes, especially JT LeRoy turning out to be a pair of women.
But authorship and race aren’t the only issues Talbott stirs up. More important is legitimacy: Who’s entitled to write what, and which group is the most oppressed?
In fact, it’s not long before Danny and Emilie reveal their own prejudices and lock horns over whom society is tougher on: him for being a white gay man or her for being a black woman.
“I know what it”’s like to be all, you know, all ghetto-ized,” Danny tells Emilie. Her reply is too long and too blue to quote here, but Wesley spits it out with the same indignant passion she brings to all her lines.
As the disputes ratchet up, Trevor and Danny’s boyfriend, Pete (Eddie Kaye Thomas), can only watch in growing discomfort.
“The Submission” is the kind of play usually described as Mamet-like: Unsympathetic characters argue over hot-button issues in a mix of quick-fire, profanity-laden exchanges and heated diatribes.
But Talbott is Mamet at his most manipulative: Both are like pyromaniacs who complain about damage to the landscape.
Helping things along here is the zippy staging by Walter Bobbie — who almost makes us overlook the fact that several scenes take place in a Starbucks for no good reason. The actors also bravely commit to the characters, warts and all.
To his credit, Talbott often makes up in punch what he lacks in subtlety: He delivers blows, and you feel them.
But it’d be pretty sweet to learn that “The Submission” was written by, say, an Asian woman instead of a white MFA guy from Yale.