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| Show | Did He Like It?* |
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Against a backdrop of 1980's privilege and power, a disturbing scandal at an all-boys prep school forces a mother to confront the truth about her son. |
Don’t Slump: Stand, Gawk, Collaborate
*By CHARLES ISHERWOOD
Published: May 20, 2008
“Good Boys and True,” about a scandal at a prep school, is a standard-issue issue play written by Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa and acted competently by a likable cast. The brouhaha in question, unfortunately, is likely to inspire more stifled yawns than furrowed brows or raised consciousnesses.
The incident driving this blunt drama, directed by Scott Ellis, which opened Monday night at the Second Stage Theater, is a sex tape circulating among the jocks at an elite boys’ school near Washington. The year is 1988, which I suspect is Mr. Aguirre-Sacasa’s attempt to inoculate the play against a cosmic shrug on the part of the audience.
High school and college students now publicize the most intimate details of their relationships on their MySpace and Facebook pages, so the discovery that a 17-year-old boy had taped a sexual encounter would hardly cause the furor today that Mr. Aguirre-Sacasa imagines it would have two decades ago. Back then, coitus videotapedus had not yet become a regular passport to greater celebrity for minor luminaries.
Unfortunately, the folks beyond the footlights cannot transport themselves into the past, and most are likely to find the uproar the play depicts to be overstated and the transgression that sets it off to be less than shocking. The play may have been inspired in part by the recent headlines about the Duke University lacrosse team, but that complicated real-life drama offers far more food for thought than Mr. Aguirre-Sacasa’s work.
“Good Boys and True” stakes a claim to significance by spicing its story line with discussions of social class, hints of sexual abuse and homosexuality, too. To little avail, I’m afraid. Mr. Aguirre-Sacasa’s characters never acquire more than two dimensions, and the play has the bland, quasi-informative sheen of a television movie predating the events it depicts.
The golden boy at the center of the story is Brandon Hardy, played by a suitably godlike young newcomer named Brian J. Smith, who looks as if he had been ordered from an Abercrombie & Fitch catalog. A star of the football and basketball teams, Brandon appears to be about as wholesome and promising as American youth can get.
Storm clouds gather over the future of this Dartmouth-bound senior when his mother, Elizabeth (J. Smith-Cameron), a doctor at a local hospital, is called into the football coach’s office one afternoon. Coach Shea (Lee Tergesen), a friend of the family, believes a tape he has confiscated from two freshmen depicts Brandon engaging in rough, possibly coercive sex with an unidentified girl. (The boy’s face is unseen.) He wants Elizabeth to corroborate his ID before he decides how to proceed.
Elizabeth is shocked at the suggestion that the upstanding Brandon could be involved, and relieved when he hotly denies it. But the matter doesn’t end there. I daren’t raise the hackles of the spoiler hysterics, so I’ll just say that by the play’s end, Brandon’s healthy sheen has been more than a little dimmed, as Elizabeth must acknowledge the possibility that the life of privilege she has given her son has insidiously warped his moral outlook.
Mr. Smith, an appealingly natural actor, glows handsomely as Brandon, so confident of the world’s regard and the future’s happy prospects that he refuses to see the shadows gathering. But Ms. Smith-Cameron, capable actress though she may be, is not ideally cast as the concerned mom. It is hard to picture this distinctive actress as the conventional, headband-wearing, jock-adoring young woman she claims to have been. Kellie Overbey, as her less conformist younger sister, Maddy, hews more closely to the classic type. Under Mr. Ellis’s foursquare direction, the performances add few emotional shadings to Mr. Aguirre-Sacasa’s explicit point-making scenes.
When he does try to keep the engine running with infusions of ambiguity and complication, they often seem implausible or inconsistent. Elizabeth is supposedly rattled to the core by the depravity of her son’s generation, but later she confesses to complicity in an unsavory incident during her years as a wealthy suburban high schooler. Brandon’s enlightened relationship with his gay best friend, Justin (a convincing Christopher Abbott), includes benefits that are apparently well known to his teammates. So why would he react with such vehement revulsion when the question of his own sexuality arises?
Previous plays from “Another Country” to “Six Degrees of Separation” have considered the themes raised in “Good Boys and True” with greater dramatic depth and emotional richness, necessary accouterments when the subject matter is less than fresh. That is certainly the case here. Whose jaw will drop at the discovery that prep schoolers learn a morally compromising sense of privilege and invincibility along with all those Latin verbs? And it will be a revelation to precisely no one that teenage boys often do stupid things, and that the stupid things are likely to involve sex.
GOOD BOYS AND TRUE
By Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa; directed by Scott Ellis; sets by Derek McLane; costumes by Tom Broecker; lighting by Kenneth Posner; music by Lewis Flinn; production stage manager, Diane DiVita; stage manager, Megan Smith; associate artistic director, Christopher Burney; production manager, Jeff Wild. Presented by the Second Stage Theater, Carole Rothman, artistic director; Ellen Richard, executive director. At the Second Stage Theater, 307 West 43rd Street, Clinton; (212) 246-4422. Through June 1. Running time: 1 hour 15 minutes.
WITH: Brian J. Smith (Brandon), J. Smith-Cameron (Elizabeth), Lee Tergesen (Coach Shea), Christopher Abbott (Justin), Kellie Overbey (Maddy) and Betty Gilpin (Cheryl).
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