I first met Di Lobontiu through a writer’s group in 2023, where they were developing their play If You’re a Man at Night, You Gotta Be a Man in the Morning. I remember being struck by Di’s joyous, free-association approach to language. In this play, dialogue works like broken autocorrect: an autograph is an ottograph, the pandemic is the pannemic, and the Olympics are the Lympics.
If You’re a Man at Night… props up disgraced swimmer Ryan Lochte as a monument to masculinity and stupidity. The show finds him facing down a long and lonely night in his McMansion, where he conjures up his company: Michael Phelps, his enemy (who is also cyclops), becomes a monument to domination. Dierdre, his wife (who is also a robot in a Hello Kitty thong) becomes a monument to womanhood. These characters, born from the big soup that is Lochte’s mind, materialize onstage to battle out questions of gender and success. As Lochte and his audience sink deeper into the purgatory of his cancellation, he confronts his ultimate question: can a person ever really come back from failure?
Late last month, I sat down to speak with Di over Zoom about the play’s origins.
If You’re a Man at Night, You Gotta Be a Man in the Morning will run at The Tank from May 15 to May 23.
This piece has been edited for both length and clarity.
Elise Wien: Where did this play come from?
Di Lobontiu: There’s this video online called Ryan Lochte Makes News Anchor Cry. To be clear, she’s crying from laughing so hard. Lochte is held up as this paragon of manliness—he has an eight pack and everyone loves him and all the ladies fawn over him. But he’s so dumb, and so heartwarmingly dumb, that the news anchor can’t help but laugh herself to tears once he’s off camera.
And I have always had this idea for a performance—originally, I thought, a drag show—that touched on masculinity, but especially the elements that you wouldn’t expect to be associated with it as much. Exploring masculinity and failure, masculinity and being dominated. And that video encompassed those contrasts so clearly. It’s this mixture of: he’s being really shamed and embarrassed, but he doesn’t even fully understand what’s happening. And at the same time, he’s incredibly high achieving, the second best swimmer in the world. It was this bizarre mix of traits, his excellence paired with his helplessness, that I found so juicy.
EW: This play takes place in 2020 and feels, tonally, very of the pandemic. It feels like being alone in your home, hallucinating. What made you want to set it at that time?
DL: 2020 was a sort of in-between time for Ryan Lochte. He had this debacle happen in 2016. He’d gotten canceled after the Rio Olympics. He’d gotten all his sponsorship deals revoked, but he hadn’t quite given up yet. And if you look at some interviews, there’s a lot with him and his wife where it’s heavily implied that she’s driving this train to get him to get to the Tokyo 2021 Olympics. And so, 2020 is this moment of potential hope where he’s training for something, he’s hoping to come back, but the odds are pretty slim because of his age.
I also think the pandemic is such an interesting time because of what that isolation does to the psyche. I think everything that he went through probably compounded during that time. And so it’s a time of absolute desolation, with a tiny little hope that things might get better.
EW: Have you always seen yourself playing the role of Ryan Lochte?
DL: It’s interesting because I had teachers, professors, tell me, you should cast a cis man in this. And I don’t think that’s a vision that I ever had for the role. The whole cast is made up of trans and non-binary people playing all these roles because it’s so interesting when you have something to play against. And these characters are so cis and they’re so straight that I think that friction—the actor against the role—is so interesting to have. I gravitate toward that, toward two seemingly opposing things being smashed up against each other.
Ryan Lochte is the number two swimmer in the world. He’s so good at it, but he’s also just number two. And then he also gets knocked down from his pedestal. And I think personally, I can relate not in that specific way, but I am a more masculine presenting person who, perhaps within my own community, I don’t always feel like I match up with the way I present. With certain stereotypes and expectations around masculinity, I feel like I don’t quite sit within that.
I’m also an immigrant, and was brought up here mainly, but also lived in Romania for a long time. And so I think there’s this sense that I always feel of two clashing forces, beating at each other and not quite fitting.
Having trans and nonbinary people onstage is important. And it serves these characters in a double-mirror sort of way. Because on the one hand, we see how an actor’s body might respond to the expectation of super-straight, super-cis behavior. But we also see how the character itself is morphed by the body that’s inhabiting it. You get a lot more.
EW: I was thinking of the Lucas Hnath play Red Speedo while reading this piece. And particularly of a monologue in that play where the protagonist, Ray, learns a bit of dubious science that tells him that the ratio between the length of the index finger and the ring finger indicates the amount of testosterone one’s body produces, and thus how athletic they are. And he notices that he has a less favorable ratio than his competitor, and therefore he will never be able to beat him. A sort of biological predetermination.
And that line of thinking is so beautifully contrasted in this piece, where there is a moment in which we learn that Olympic swimmer Katie Ledecky has sort of overcome her biology, against all odds. That she swam much faster than anyone thought her body should “allow her” to swim. That she beat Lochte in practice.
DL: There is this moment of dialogue that Ryan has with Deirdre where he says, well, women have small bodies and men have large bodies and that’s just how it is. There’s no way to get past that.
And I’m interested in how that can be simultaneously true and false like within the trans community. Like, what are the limitations of how we are born? Will we always have to face some aspect of that? And how do we make our experiences with biology legible to people who are not trans or might not support our choices? Do they have a point in emphasizing biology? And if they do, how do we counteract that with our own humanity, which is a lot more expansive than just that tiny little point?
And then with Katie Ledecky, we have a situation where the biological expectation does get bucked. Then how do we receive it? Are we actually open to receiving the kind of change that implies?
EW: Do you watch sports? Do you play sports?
DL: Yeah, I love sports. I’ve played volleyball since I was 12. I played it in high school, a little bit in college. And I still play on rec leagues. I love watching sports, and find that physicality is really important to me. And it factors into how I write, too. And certainly how I act. I like thinking through how movement makes you feel, how it makes you free or constrained. And also, who’s allowed to do these types of movements, and who is not. Because I think there’s a lot of freedom implied in it, in being able to do sports. And when you’re not allowed to, I think that says a lot about what society’s intentions are for your body.
EW: In addition to swimmers, this piece has angels, the divine masculine, Kristens (which is, delightfully, what Ryan Lochte calls Christians). It has grace and second chances. Could you talk a little bit about the role of divinity in this piece?
DL: Yeah, yeah, it’s a huge role. I started off by thinking about Ryan Lochte’s journey from the very bottom, from a very hopeless place, where he’s trying to climb back up.
And to me, the things that matter when you’re at the bottom like that are images, scenes, and scenarios where you can envision yourself growing or being given grace or climbing out of the hole. And the thing that kept tugging at me was this stupid scene in Les Miserables where Jean Valjean steals the priest’s candlestick and makes off with all his silverware, and then he gets apprehended and brought back, and the police ask him, did this man steal your silver? We’ll put him in jail if so. And the priest says, oh no, he didn’t. He actually forgot the other candlestick. And it’s a silly little Christian moment, whatever. But I do think there’s a lot of power in that. In the simplicity of actions and how we give each other grace and how that’s really the only thing that lets you move forward if you have fucked up in some way.
And that goes for the audience too. The audience has the ultimate act of grace giving. I don’t want to spoil the play, but the audience plays a big role in providing these images and scenarios that Ryan can see, to climb himself out of the hole.
EW: Who else is on this team with you?
DL: Em Hausmann, our director, was recommended to me through this writer’s group, and they are lovely and crafty and funny, and really bring the physicality of the piece to life. Acting alongside me are Utkarsh Rajawat, who, like me, also started out as an actor, but is mainly a playwright right now. Danny Koenig, who’s the other actor, is also a playwright, lyricist, and composer. And it’s been really exciting to develop this work with a group of people who are all wearing these different hats. There’s a really strong awareness of story and of narrative structure, that has been helpful for editorial conversations in the rehearsal room.
We’ve been having a great time. We rehearsed at this pre-K that Em works at for free, which feels very true to the vibe of what the play is. There’s this ball pit you can jump into; it’s a ritzy preschool.
EW: What is your favorite Ryan Lochte quote?
DL: In 2012, he tweeted “Rocks, paper, siccor……..” That is my #1.
EW: What does Ryan Lochte’s catchphrase “Jeah” mean to you?
DL: I think Jeah is a cry of exuberance. It’s an animalistic return to our inner joy. I think it’s just like, you’re having a great time. And you’re like, Jeah.
Performances of If You’re a Man at Night, You Gotta Be a Man in the Morning start May 15th at The Tank Theater.
Tickets can be purchased here.
Leave a Reply