Gender Trouble: THE PASS & HUNGRY WOMEN— Review Roundup

John Donnelly’s gay sports drama The Pass is likely best remembered as a highlight of Russell Tovey’s imperial 2010s—a lowkey indie perfectly suited for the Looking crowd which, like his breakout, The History Boys, again captured the actor’s ability to translate an original stage performance for the screen. Inheriting the role of the closeted footballer Jason for the play’s U.S. premiere, Matisse Ratron-Neal substitutes Tovey’s affable woundedness for a boisterous swagger that inches closer to belligerence as his psyche deteriorates. It’s a magnetic performance well-suited to Max Hunter’s staging, which opts for exclamation points over question marks and successfully brings the play into 2026. By this point, the trappings of quiet queer desperation are, if not passé, then no longer in vogue. I, personally, don’t find myself caring much these days for the is-he-or-isn’t-he variety of queer drama since, hint: they usually are.

The one-acter is built around three hotel room encounters Jason has over 12 years, with childhood soccer pal Ade (Terry Bell) appearing in the first and last. That the two will hook up at some point during that first scene is a foregone conclusion, so Hunter shifts the focus to their performance of masculinity. If it means less sexuality simmering in the story, so be it. Hunter, to quote the older queen sitting behind me as Ratron-Neal opened the show, jump-roping in his underwear, “knows what he’s doing” to keep things plenty sexy. The swap doesn’t always pay off: Donnelly gives them so much over-compensatory dialogue about women and their supposed virility that it becomes a bit exhausting to then add constant bro-isms like hip thrusts and affectedly deeper voices.

It’s hard to argue with those displays of hypermasculinity when, in the following scene, the actress Ino Badanjak performs with enough genuine charismatic vigor to put the entire concept of masculinity to shame. She plays Lyndsey, a stripper Jason picks up a few years later, once his career has launched him into worldwide fame. Their playful interaction winds up revealing the glass prison he’s set up for himself, which begins to fully shatter years after that, during a spectacular late night crash-out aided by an overzealous bell boy (Oliver Rowland-Jones).

Hunter’s crisis of masculinity take on the material is anthropologized in Seth Byrum’s handsome set, which places the audience on both sides of the action and is re-dressed with increasing luxury for each scene. Cheyenne Sykes deploys some clever blackouts through her lighting design, and Megan Culley’s sound and Dwight Bellisimo’s video work add jolts of overstimulation. They’re reflected in Ratron-Neal’s performance; as Jason’s inability to accept himself spirals his life up and out of control, his face nimbly contorts to evince the effects of his psychological and narcotic self-abuse. It’s rare to see an actor look as believably fucked up as he does in the play’s final moments. Bell matches this with a seething but composed rage at who his friend has become; a deep disappointment, tempered by empathetic understanding, that rings powerfully true.

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Melissa Maney takes a similarly maximalist, years-spanning approach to gender exploration in the potent Hungry Women, which imagines a world without men, beginning 1891. In olde Massachusetts, four women mourn husbands who have recently died from plague and war and a general sense of not knowing how to stay alive. Now it’s their turn to wonder how to keep going and, in a nod to Sweeney Todd’s righteous survivalism, the proto-feminist of the group announces she’s turned her dearly departed’s flesh into sandwich meat. Appalled, they ask if this was motivated purely by hunger. No, she replies, “I ate George because the moment his flesh touched my lips I revoked the authority he abused to belittle me in our prison of a marriage.”

Especially as delivered by a feral Sophie Zmorrod, the line reminded me of something the anti-colonialist Frantz Fanon once wrote, that “For the native, life can only spring up again out of the rotting corpse of the settler.” It’s a righteous fury the actor ably embodies, winning over even the most conventional of the three (Julia Lester), who savors her cunning wins within their patriarchal system and dismisses the idea of revolution. The two performers retain those essential traits as the action jumps a century—Lester now plays a peace-keeping substitute teacher and Zmorrod a rabble-rousing student; Zoe Dean’s characters remain a ball of nerves, and Mariyea’s are witty and skeptical.

In a 1991 Herstory class, three young women learn about these long-vanished “men” and their backwards society. In this matriarchy, they fear being drafted into motherhood, the career-killing fate which took their usual teacher, and for which the drafting age was just lowered to 18. Maney has fun with some alternate-reality flourishes, like a character working for the MoMA (Museum of Male Annihilation) and another scared to come out as straight, but the play does settle into a predictable structure, as can happen with conceptually top-heavy conceits. By the third time jump, in an Orwellian 2091 where women have advanced far enough to become surveillance despots, we know where the playwright stands, we know how her characters feel, and we know exactly where this is going.

That first act is remarkably strong, though, dotted with spotlit asides where each woman reveals a bit of herself while expounding on dueling ideologies about gender, survival and power. (How many plays right now are so deftly evoking Fanon?) And Daniella Caggiano’s production remains engaging and highly enjoyable—her scene transitions involve the women ripping off Olivia Hern’s period costumes, or shifting Qingan Zhang’s simple, communal set, which opens on a table cloth with embroidery straight out of Judy Chicago’s “Dinner Party.” The cast takes to the material with fierce intelligence, equally committed to crafting real humans as they are to embodying Maney’s dialectics. The winner of last year’s SoHo Playhouse Lighthouse Series competition, Hungry Women is hardly starved for material, and serves up a playwright ravished with talent and voracious in ambition.

The Pass is in performance through September 4, 2026 at La MaMa on East 4th Street in New York City. For tickets and more information, visit here.

Hungry Women is in performance through August 30, 2026 at SoHo Playhouse on Vandam Street in New York City. For tickets and more information, visit here.