"Good Boys and True" - Steppenwolf Theatre - January 11, 2008 - Chicago

For those of you who are planning to see the show here are things you might like to know: it's a traditional narrative; part of it deals with homosexuality; the acting is wonderful (Martha Levy, as usual, is fantastic and the young Stephen Louis Grosh is a treat to watch); and, it's smart enough to keep your attention but traditional enough to not turn anyone off.  Now I'm going to give away the plot so stop reading.

The protagonist, a very popular and cute senior at a fancy prep school where he is captain of the football team, has two secrets. One he's willing to let be known although it might mean being kicked out of school or at least the football team, having his admission revoked from the Ivy League college of his choice, having all his schoolmates know he's done something despicable to a young woman, and being dragged through the mud in the local media, to name a few. The other he refuses to have known. If the former secrets gets out, he could lose the life he's on track to lead. If the second secret gets out, it won't have any lasting consequences (apart from losing some friends he knows are losers anyway). Why then, would he choose the hide the second and not the first?

The first act of the play is incredibly tense; I felt like I was wound up tight as a fist and getting tighter all the time. As we learn that he's seduced an unsuspecting girl, videotaped her without her consent, and circulated it to his football buddies (the first secret), we also learn that he's gay and in love with his best friend (the second secret). The shock of the first act, and to me the power of it, is learning that he'd rather have the first secret be known in order to cover up the second. We realize that being considered a near rapist and losing the privileges that his life affords him are better than acknowledging that he's gay.

The second act complicates and extends the themes. The protagonist's mother, a very decent woman who recognizes that her sons has exploited a young woman and robbed her of her dignity, tries to understand his motivation. She doesn't believe that he would do this just because he felt like it and refuses to let it drop until he acknowledges his reason for doing it. We learn that he had tried to tell his father that he was gay and that the guys on the football team suspected it and that it was his father who advised him to do this. For a while one thinks that the father's sin is one that is commonplace in the United States: he's absent.  But we learn that it's worse than that -- this doctor who is in the third world providing free medical care for the poor authors his son's crime, oppresses his son by refusing to accept his homosexuality, and, uses the institutions of privilege (in this case the old boys' network at the fancy prep school where he had also once been the captain of the football team) to perpetrate this despicable act. As if that weren't enough, we learn that the mother, who loves her son very much, knew his was gay and never encouraged him to acknowledge it. In the first conversation between them, she asks her son "We don't have any secrets, do we?" but never encouraged openness about that. While she did not author this act, she could have prevented it.

Almost as much as the theme and the script, I loved the depiction of adolescence in the play and Stephen Louis Grusch is perfect. He's less handsome than cute, a quality that is more likely to get you the girls in high school. He is largely removed from what is happening around him throughout much of the play and his speech is slow and his face blank as he tries to bide his time. In a very adolescent way, he doesn't believe that the worst could happen to him and he's perfectly willing to perpetrate a horrible sin in order to hide something that would embarrass him, believing that in time something will work out. The restraint of his acting pays off when he finally tells his mother that he's gay, that's she's known but not acknowledged it, and that his father told him to do this thing. He bursts into tears. Martha Levy draws him to her and puts her forehead against his. It's the most beautiful moment in the play.

There are some things that didn't work for me. The girl who had been seduced and videotaped is a bit too wise and her purpose in the script is to point out the complexities of the motivations of the mother and the son. The boyfriend is maybe just a tad too comfortable with his homosexuality and a bit too wise for me to find him completely believable. And, the playwright, Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa, explains himself in the second act more than I would like. Those are minor things, though, considering what the play and the production accomplish.

The play ends with a flashback to the boys' first year in high school, when they first met in the locker room. The play presents a series of dualities and this scene is a perfect representation. We read the scene with the weight of the things we'd already learned but also with the nostalgia of seeing a representation of the past. We see that they are gay and immediately drawn to each other, that they came from different places and were heading different places (football vs. track), and that they both loved the Hardy Boys (also a sign of their homosexuality) and that while one acknowledges it but the other will deny it to his friends. There is such innocence and such hope in the scene and we feel two things simultaneously. We know that this hope will be smashed but also that it can be restored. The innocence is forever gone but it can be replaced with promise. It's a far different feeling than the tight fist of the first act and the playwright's suggestion is that we must throw off the privilege of inheritance to salvage a future of pain and oppression that might very well be written into our futures. We are trapped with our past writing our futures and yet we have hope that if we tackle the thing hed on, we might see some success