Chicago Theater Review: GOOD BOYS AND TRUE (Raven Theatre Company)

Gay playwright Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa (contributor to Glee and Big Love) may have stumbled with his over-the-top dark comedy Say You Love Satan–produced in Chicago by About Face Theatre–but this Raven Theatre revival of the burning drama that Steppenwolf debuted seven years ago proves a rare skill: Aguirre-Sacasa can create solid stagecraft with a moral center. Strong but not sensational, the scandal at the heart of this drama–and its heart beats strongly indeed–is not earth-shattering. Nor is the TV-movie plot (a kind of opposite version of the Tyler Clementi tragedy) particularly groundbreaking. What distinguishes Good Boys and True from modern moral melodramas is its determination to show how class influences and often deforms character: Unearned privilege corrupts a personality as much as celebrity worship or overnight fame.

In 2007 the cultural backdrop for the play was the sex scandal involving privileged lacrosse players at Duke University. Here the “1%” setting, much like the playwright’s own experiences at the toxically entitled Georgetown Prep, is Saint Joseph’s Preparatory School for Boys, an exclusive Jesuit prep school in 1988. A smarmily revealing videotape circulates through the campus. The metastasizing VCR supposedly depicts handsome, blond beauty Brandon Hardy, a senior jock from a wealthy family, having heavy sex with a minor who’s clearly unaware that her loss of virginity was being reduced to amateur porn. Brandon, pampered scion of renowned physicians, must answer to his mother Elizabeth, who demands to know whether he’s the boy in the tape and who the victim is. Meanwhile, Brandon’s coach tries to contain the uproar by temporarily banning sports, the lifeblood of a supposed learning institution.

Will this outrage out of Les Liaisons Dangereuses damage Brandon’s chances for Dartmouth, even though he’s a “legacy” certainty for admission? What about Brandon’s closeted and conditional devotion to his infinitely more honest buddy Justin Simmons? Are the sins of the father visited on the son?

Actually, the main matter at stake in this Washington suburb is a bigger question: Does the fear of sexual exposure warp “good boys and true” into vicious users? It’s tempting to push the plot further. But it’s enough that Aguirre-Sacasa creates an adolescent hotbed of repressed eroticism, dynastic differences that fuel sexual manipulation, and a self-fulfilling family history of thuggishness in pursuit of power. The worst irony: To protect his privacy Brandon utterly destroys Cheryl’s, thus earning a special circle in contemporary hell.

Yet, balancing these soul-shrinking forces where consequences don’t matter is a kind of dogged decency. Matching the play in its second-act strength, Cody Estle’s at-time histrionic staging soars as it depicts Brandon’s mother (a steely, sometimes strident but galvanizing Maggie Cain). In a “tale of two classes” meeting, she visits Cheryl (Sophia Menendian), the much-wronged fast-food drudge in the videotape who was flattered, then ruined for any marriage, by this golden boy. This semi-incandescent encounter exposes the aching humanity of women from different backgrounds trying to do the right thing, characteristically cleaning things up after men have done their easy worst.