Maybe a play can be revised too often. Take the case of Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa's Good Boys and True, which was two hours long when it played at Steppenwolf in Chicago last year. Now clocking in at 85 minutes, has it been tightened or eviscerated? The author, praised for The Mystery Plays and Dark Matters, has a gift for writing character-specific dialogue but here pens a work that seems more an outline than a fully fleshed piece with room to breathe. Starting out like Doubt, this story of sex, privilege, guilt, exploitation, and class too soon devolves into an afterschool special, which is unfortunate given the talents of writer, cast, and director.
Handsome Brandon Hardy is captain of the football team and a top scholar at St. Joseph's Prep near Washington, D.C., a school thriving on legacy. Loved, admired, and coddled, Brandon is in his senior year (the time is 1988) and has been accepted at Dartmouth. A golden child from a wealthy family, he is surely a future master of the universe. All is sunny and glorious until the discovery of a videotape that shows a graphic sexual encounter between an unknown girl and someone who might be Brandon. (The boy's face is unseen.) Could this son of two doctors be the culprit? If so, can the damage be contained, even though the tape has apparently been viewed by many people and it's only a matter of time before the press zeroes in?
The questions at the heart of the play's mystery are brought to light by Coach Shea and must be solved by Brandon's mother, Elizabeth. But the doubts engendered are more melodramatic than thematic, the answers having less to do with inherent values than plot developments. Brandon has both an unseen girlfriend, with whom he may or may not be having sex, and Justin, a fellow male student with whom he most definitely has. Throw in an absentee father, off on a humanitarian mission in Central America, plus a subterranean plot line about the father's seesaw relationship with the current football coach when they were also students at St. Joseph's, and you soon have a scattershot play that loses focus.
As Brandon, a boy who "was raised to be considerate," Brian J. Smith is ingratiating, manipulative, and alluring without being smarmy. As Justin, Christopher Abbott is bold and proud, avoiding self-pity and weakness. Kellie Overbey is forthright as Maddy, Elizabeth's no-nonsense sister, while Lee Tergesen invests the coach with a quiet yet specific determination. In her one scene as Cheryl, the girl on the tape, Betty Gilpin superbly limns a character neither naive nor slutty but sympathetic and self-aware.
The play's fulcrum is Elizabeth and, in the hands of the too rarely seen J. Smith-Cameron, it's a doozy. The veteran actor manages to be both steely and vulnerable as a woman who has turned whatever insecurities she's had into becoming a lifesaving physician who, however, may not be able to save her own family. It's a nuanced portrayal, handled with great delicacy under Scott Ellis' precise, understated direction. As vital to the play's milieu is Derek McLane's trophy-strewn main set. Lewis Flinn's haunting score hints at discoveries still to come.
Produced by and at Second Stage Theatre,
307 W. 43rd St., NYC.
May 19-June 1. Tue., 7 p.m.; Wed.-Sat., 8 p.m.; Wed. and Sat., 2 p.m.; Sun., 3 p.m. (Performances on Thu., May 22, and Fri., May 23, are at 7 p.m.)
(212) 246-4422 or www.2st.com.
Casting by Mele Nagler.