"Good Boys and True" Isn’t True To Itself

I like a play that wrestles with a knotty problem and, in the process, forces me to take a stand on a difficult issue. In the old days, they used to call such works problem plays. But the biggest problem with Good Boys and True, Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa’s ambitious play about a sex scandal at a boys’ school now running at the Second Stage Theatre through June 1, is that it doesn’t know which problem it wants to deal with. There are enough issues in this play to tie up “The Oprah Winfrey Show” for at least a week.

Sitting over a couple of glasses of wine at the Broadway restaurant Orso's after the show, my pal Bill and I tried to figure out what the play is really about. Was it a coming out saga? Or a cautionary family drama about contemporary parenting? Or a jeremiad against class privilege in American society? Each of these is a worthy subject and one that I'd be happy to see examined on stage. But it’s hard to do all of them justice in just 90 intermissionless minutes.

The eagerness to crowd so much into Good Boys and True plays havoc with its internal logic. One minute we're told that the jocks on the school's football team are so aware of a one-way relationship that one of its members is having with a gay classmate that they joke about getting in on the action; the next moment we hear that a participant in that relationship worries about what will happen when one of those same team members walks in on the pair. Similarly, we’re lead to believe that the parents of one of the boys are intimately involved in their son’s life and yet when a crisis occurs the father never shows up. It’s hard for a playwright who’s dealing with all of this turmoil to keep all the balls in the air (and yes, pun intended). But if there’s no room in the budget for a dramaturge, shouldn’t the director be speaking up?

Good Boys and True reportedly ran two hours in its original production at Chicago’s Steppenwolf Theatre last year (click here to see an excerpt from that production). I don’t know what was cut or why but even the longer production seems to have left some critics as unsatisfied as my pal Bill and I were. “Aguirre-Sacasa's play is wholly contrived, heavy-handed and flatly rendered,” complained the Chicago Sun-Times. Which raises the question of why Second Stage decided to bring the play to New York. One hopes it isn’t because the playwright’s pedigree—he went to the Yale School of Drama, writes award-winning Marvel comic books and his father recently ran for president of Nicaragua—offers the kind of backstory that's a magnet for media coverage.

There are, however, some redeeming qualities about the New York production. The best is Derek McLane’s trophy-laden set, which is not only handsome but quietly eloquent about the values our society places on achievement. But there are lovely acting turns too. Christopher Abbott captures all the awkward pride of a young gay boy who knows who he is, what it costs to be so and willingly makes the decision to pay that price. Betty Gilpin delivers the best scene in the play as a young lower class woman equally aware of how little she is valued in a winner take all society.

And yet, in the end, they weren’t enough. There was silence when the play ended at the performance that Bill and I attended. Not the silence of awe. But the silence of “is that all?” I wanted to like this play. I congratulate Aguirre-Sacasa for taking on such tough stuff. But, as the Latin-speaking students in Good Boys and True might say, simplex sigillum veri: simplicity is the sign of truth.