Xia directs Harris's Tender at the strip club
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- Dave Harris's "Tender" is set in the fictional New Jersey strip club The Dancing Bears, where a dwindling crowd of middle-school teachers and recovering divorcees watches dancers in teddy-bear heads and neon-green jocks
- Matthew Xia directs the production with what the reviewer calls "swagger and finesse," staging the action mostly in a downbeat back office rather than the show floor
- Jessie Mei Li plays B, the club owner's daughter, who is drafted in to rescue the dancers after Geoff suffers an onstage panic attack and declares of the men: "None of you are men"
- Dex Lee plays Geoff as a "foghorn," while Darren Bennett is the non-dancing "grizzly dad" and Kwami Odoom impresses on the pole but is "baffled" when B asks if he actually enjoys sex
- Shelley Maxwell serves as both choreographer and intimacy director, and Ciarán Cunningham designs the lighting — including "slutty pink" for the showtime scenes
- Harris's earlier incendiary play Tambo & Bones argued that Blackness is entertainment in the US; Tender extends that identity-as-commodity lens into sex, pleasure, parenthood, and masculinity
- The reviewer judges the play "packed as a go-go boy's pouch" but notes that Harris's pumped-up writing "jiggles similar arguments a few times too often"
Why it matters: Harris extends the identity-as-commodity argument from "Tambo & Bones" into masculinity and sex work, with Jessie Mei Li's sharp antagonist — who dismisses the dancers as "none of you are men" and deploys "dubious therapy techniques" with "a startling disdain for empathy" — driving the play's most pointed confrontations. The reviewer's mixed verdict signals a provocative premise that lands with the cast and Xia's direction but doesn't fully sharpen its repeated arguments about male vulnerability and pleasure.
