When reviewing a play, I’m generally completely uninterested in knowing anything about the playwright’s life. It doesn’t really matter whether William Shakespeare or Christopher Marlowe or the Earl of Oxford wrote Hamlet, because the play’s the thing. But after seeing Good Boys and True, I was curious about Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa. Wikipedia tells me he was in his mid 30s when he wrote Good Boys and True (2008), and that since then he’s written for TV series such as Glee, Supergirl, and Riverdale.
While none of this is pertinent to evaluating Good Boys and True, if you know those series, you’ll recognize the tone of this tale of fallout from a student-made sex tape circulating at a storied prep school. Aguirre-Sacasa writes young, which leaves his take on a serious subject falling somewhere between a PSA and an ABC After-school Special, but with language better suited to HBO.
It’s 1989,the good-looking senior Brandon Hardy (Wes Mathison) has it all. He’s a legacy student at prestigious St. Joseph’s and captain of the football team. He’s got his parents’ complete backing (financial and otherwise) and has already been accepted to Dartmouth. The world is his oyster, until a sex tape begins making the rounds, first at St. Joe’s, then at other area schools. Although it’s impossible conclusively to identify the boy, Brandon’s coach, Russell (Thomas Trudgeon), thinks he knows who it is and contacts Brandon’s mother (April Sigman Marx) to see whether she and her well-connected husband—Russell’s best friend at St. Joe’s back in the day—will help make it go away. But Brandon insists that it isn’t him, so the Hardys let things run their course.
[SPOILER ALERT for the rest of the review.]
The most sophisticated aspect of Good Boys and True is a Nature vs. Nurture argument. Aguirre-Sacasa introduces numerous possible contributing factors to why a boy who seems so well outfitted for success would not only abuse a young girl the way he does, but then sow the seeds of his own demise. Is it the culture of St. Joe’s, where this kind of thing has been tolerated for generations? Is it Brandon’s parents, who were complicit with such behavior in their time? Is it Brandon’s repressed homoerotic leanings, which go against his image of the person he’s supposed to be? Is it the gap between the haves and the have-nots? Was Brandon simply born empathy-blind? To his credit, Aguirre-Sacasa doesn’t feel the need to shove an answer down our throats.
Unfortunately, his dialog raises these questions awkwardly. “I would have covered this up,” Brandon’s mother says. “I would have protected you! I would have done anything!” All of the characters talk like characters rather than people, which makes it difficult for the actors not to come off stiffly. The cast’s best moments are during their most emotional scenes, where the actors are able to work their way into a little looseness. The most fraught exchange between Brandon and his mother certainly paves the way for Mathison’s and Marx’s best moments. The most consistently good performance is Kayla Manuel as the girl on the tape. Like everyone else, she is hamstrung by Aguirre-Sacasa’s wonkiness, but you can’t miss her ability to inject pathos into her half-drawn character. I hope one day to see her in a play that let’s her be all she can be.
Hugh O’Gorman’s direction makes the overall production feel more workshop-level than performance-ready (although his minimalist approach—perfectly reasonable for this material—probably exaggerates that feeling). Also, populating all of the many scene changes with alternative hits from the ’80s (The Cure, Depeche Mode, Yaz) may be a bit much—this isn’t really a period piece, after all—particularly when he begins recycling them (especially Tangerine Dream’s Risky Business piece, which is a bit too on-the-nose, methinks).
Good Boys and True seems to have been written for a target demographic that extends three years on either side of 20, so it may be appropriate that it’s playing on a college campus mostly to undergrads seeing it for course credit. Unfortunately, it comes nowhere near to clearing the high bar that Cal Rep has set with many of their previous productions.
GOOD BOYS AND TRUE CALIFORNIA REPERTORY • THEATRE ARTS BUILDING (CSULB SOUTH CAMPUS—ENTER W CAMPUS DR OFF 7TH ST) • LONG BEACH 90840 • 562.985.5526 CALREP.ORG • TUES-FRI 8PM, SAT 2PM & 8PM • $14-$17 • THROUGH MAY 13
(Photo credit: Kip I. Polakoff)