Theater: 'Good Boys' Untrue

Sometimes critics can know too much about a play’s development: Good Boys and True, currently at Second Stage, is a case in point. Last summer I saw a workshop of the play at the Eugene O’Neill Theater Center in Connecticut, where I teach critical writing. The O’Neill is one of our great play-development venues because it offers a safe environment for artists—safe from critics, that is. In exchange, critics are allowed to play an entirely informal role in the goings-on, mostly limited to drinking at the bar with artists after the show and offering advice when solicited. Otherwise, you keep quiet and assume the writer will fix the play’s problems before it moves on.

Had Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa solicited my advice about Good Boys, which segued from the O’Neill to its world premiere at Chicago’s Steppenwolf Theatre Company before coming to New York, I’d have told him that its length—two-and-a-half hours with one intermission—wasn’t at issue. Yet he cut the play to 85 minutes, no intermission. If he’d asked me, I’d have told him that his characters are well drawn, starting with Brandon (Brian J. Smith), who is captain of the football team at an elite prep school and accused by Coach Shea (Lee Tergesen) of videotaping himself having rough sex with a girl from a local public school and surreptitiously distributing the tape. Neither the coach nor Brandon’s mother, Elizabeth (J. Smith-Cameron), can be sure of just who’s on the tape, as faces and bodies are blurry.

Elizabeth confronts Brandon, who denies everything. Soon, he’s chatting in a locker room with his buddy Justin (Christopher Abbott), denying everything again. As staged by director Scott Ellis, this scene crackles with energy. Pressed by Justin to explain why he and Brandon can’t play on the same team during practice, Brandon says, “When we’re on the same team—when we’re both sweating and in close proximity to each other—I cannot keep my hands off your hard, hard body, and that makes everyone around us incredibly uncomfortable.” Hmm…no, those fuzzy figures couldn’t be Brandon and the girl.

While Elizabeth is initially clueless about Brandon and Justin, she’s increasingly unsure that it’s not Brandon on the tape; her lighthearted sister Maddy (Kellie Overbey) is basically convinced of it. As such matters do tend to ooze into the public sphere after a while, soon the whole town is discussing the tape, and the media becomes involved. Yes, in fact, it was Brandon on the tape. The question is why he did it.

Here’s where being privy to the development of Good Boys and True is a curse and a blessing. In the workshop, the fact that Coach Shea and Brandon’s father are alumni of the prep school is vital—it takes the idea of brotherhood, of what it means to be “good boys and true,” out in the back somewhere and shoots it. Turns out there was a rivalry between Coach Shea and Brandon’s father that turned out badly—something about being equally matched football players and a coach who forced them to decide among themselves who should be captain, and something involving buggering. The discovery of the tape by Coach Shea and his investigation, you see, was really payback a generation in the making. But you won’t see any of that. Nor will you meet the father, who in the earlier version was also unseen but who, we’re told, intuited his son’s sexuality and put him up to the videotaping—forcing his son to prove his manhood.

And we ask why certain performances lack impact? Smith-Cameron’s quirky, penetrating charm does her no favors, and she lacks maternal instinct. Smith, forceful earlier this year in Come Back, Little Sheba, can’t decide if he’s playing a naive boy or a naive man and seems unmoored. Abbott’s gawky persona lets him play against Smith beautifully, but it’s hard to imagine Smith, with his phenomenal physique, attracted to such a comparatively lean boy. Overbey doesn’t overplay opposite Smith-Cameron, but the sister’s character is really only there to lighten up dark scenes. Tergesen’s character has been winnowed to a shell.

The scene between Elizabeth and Cheryl (Betty Gilpin), the girl in the videotape, contains the seeds of Aguirre-Sacasa’s redemption, however. It’s gorgeous, and it’s where the truth of the play lies—if Aguirre-Sacasa would be willing to rewrite it one more time.

Through June 1. Second Stage Theatre, 307 W. 43rd St. (betw. 8th & 9th Aves.), 212-246-4422; $70.