A Well-Manicured Meltdown

In his few short years on the New York scene, the playwright Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa has proven to be a natural entertainer. Good actors like to sink their teeth into his dialogue, and his hard-charging stories proceed with the speed and verve of television. But he takes a leap forward with his latest drama, “Good Boys and True,” displaying a new deftness in layering troubling moral questions under a smooth, entertaining surface. The play goes down easy, but its aftertaste is sharp.The story is a familiar one — secret prep school prank goes south, with chilling repercussions — but Scott Ellis’s sleek, dynamic production brings it to bristling life. Mr. Ellis gets plenty of help from a superb cast, especially J. Smith-Cameron, who finds an unexpected range of possibilities in the role of Elizabeth, a super-achieving mother in pearls and twinset.Elizabeth’s well-manicured life in an upscale D.C. suburb is thrown into chaos by the allegation that her only child, Brandon (Brian J. Smith, perfectly cast), the captain of the football team, has made a disturbing sex tape, which is now being passed around among the boys at his exclusive prep school. (In the tape, only the face of the unwitting girl is visible.) Because Brandon, a broad-shouldered senior bound for Dartmouth, is the sort of kid who looks right at home in a navy blue blazer — and because he denies it — Elizabeth puts her suspicions to rest. But with her husband out of town, she increasingly finds herself interrogating her decision to send Brandon to St. Joe’s, her husband’s alma mater. After all, as her more progressive sister Maddy (Kellie Overbey) points out, St. Joe’s is as well-known for its culture of macho hazing as for producing captains of industry.Brandon, meanwhile, has his own problems with the school’s macho culture. He’s been gingerly experimenting with sex with his best friend Justin (Christopher Abbott), something the other football players are starting to pick up on.Though the struggling gay teen is an increasingly familiar character, the scenes between Justin and Brandon are written with absolute honesty. Every aspect of their conversations, from the slang to the jokes, from the sexual tension to the petulant fights, rings true. Mr. Abbott has an extraordinary ease in the role of Justin, a gay teenager secure in his identity and frustrated by Brandon’s evasions. His eyes pass over Brandon’s body with a yearning made more acute by the long odds against its gratification. Instinctively, he knows Brandon is the sort of guy who’s impossible to get close to.That’s the reality that Elizabeth can’t face about her son, but she will confront it yet. As the story progresses — and Brandon’s role in the sex tape scandal is disclosed — Elizabeth tries to tap into the soul of the child she raised, only to find him refractory at every turn. She searches him for signs of remorse, for an acknowledgment of the maliciousness of the prank. Surely, she thinks, he can understand the class implications of plucking a girl from the food court of the local mall and exploiting her for sport.Yet he can’t. Instead, it is Elizabeth who goes to the food court to apologize to the girl (a poignant Betty Gilpin), and Elizabeth who begins to look with disgust upon the cocoon of privilege she and her husband have built. That these small moral victories loom so large is a testament to Ms. Smith-Cameron’s gale-force performance.Under Mr. Ellis’s brisk direction, the play flows satisfyingly forward, staged expertly between the moving pieces of Derek McLane’s stylish, large-scale set. Tall shelves of gleaming trophies eloquently suggest the empty glory that is St. Joe’s, while the cozy living room is a heartbreaking reminder of a schism in the family’s history — it belongs to an earlier, unsullied time.“Good Boys and True” makes for a remarkably engaging, if not transcendent, evening. There is still, in Mr. Aguirre-Sacasa’s writing, a tendency to revert to familiar conventions (such as furnishing a series of pat parallels between the generations), and the story he has to tell has recycled elements. Yet it’s a story with a robust moral dilemma at its crux, and as he tells it, he holds an audience in the palm of his hand.Until June 1 (307 W. 43rd St., between Eighth and Ninth avenues, 212-246-4422).

A Well-Manicured Meltdown

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