Probably no one does tense, awkward nerd better than Jesse Eisenberg. We’ve seen him play that type in the movies “The Social Network” and “Adventureland,” and in the off-Broadway plays he wrote and starred in — the awkward but innocuous guy of “Asuncion” and the full-on obnoxious writer of “The Revisionist.”
Eisenberg wrote “The Spoils,” and in it he takes his familiar avatar to its logical conclusion, going from oddball to sociopath.
This time around, he plays Ben, a barely functional, borderline psychotic aspiring filmmaker. The full extent of his problems are revealed over the course of the evening, even if you can tell that Ben is a piece of work from the beginning.
There is, for instance, the way he treats his roommate, Kalyan (the excellent Kunal Nayyar, from “The Big Bang Theory”), a fundamentally nice business-school student from Nepal. Ben’s rich dad bought the apartment, so Ben needs company rather than money, yet he talks to Kalyan with a mix of affection and hostility.
He’s even worse with Kalyan’s doctor girlfriend (Annapurna Sriram), whom he greets with a flip “Hey, Reshma, you’re looking very Indian tonight.”
What triggers Ben’s spiral from pest to threat is a chance reunion with two friends from elementary school: a nice banker named Ted (Michael Zegen) and the even nicer Sarah (Erin Darke), a do-gooder teacher. The pair are now engaged to be married, much to Ben’s despair — he crushed on Sarah as a child, and once had a perverse sex dream about her that still haunts him decades later.
You could argue that we didn’t need to hear that dream’s disgusting specifics, but it’s rewarding to see Eisenberg fully commit to Ben’s craziness. A generation’s arrested development and entitled narcissism are presented as plain awful.
Speedily directed by Scott Elliott, this New Group production barrels through, and the young cast navigates the dense dialogue and snarky remarks with expert ease.
The one caveat is a scaredy last-minute cop-out, as if Eisenberg couldn’t quite face what he’d wrought. Still, for the first time in his short career as a playwright, we can’t wait to see what he’ll do next.