Over the weekend, I caught an early preview of “Good Boys and True,” the new play by Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa, starring J. Smith-Cameron, at the Second Stage Theatre in Manhattan.
Aguirre-Sacasa is a rising star off-Broadway, where his “The Mystery Plays” and “Based on a Totally True Story,” have intrigued and entertained me in recent seasons.
J. Smith-Cameron is one of the glories of the New York theatre, a stage actress of dazzling versatility and power, whose performance in Douglas Carter Beane’s “As Bees in Honey Drown,” as a Manhattan fast-lane woman who keeps reinventing herself, was widely admired (if the off-Broadway hit had ever made it to Broadway, Smith-Cameron would have had a lock on the Tony Award).
“Good Boys and True” is a gripping drama about the repercussions of a sex-tape scandal at a Jesuit high school in Washington, D.C. in the late 1980s.
Brandon (Brian J. Smith) is a star football player — and an all-around nice guy — who becomes suspect number one when a tape surfaces of a school athlete having rough sex with a girl. The boy’s face is not visible on the tape, but from the back he looks a lot like Brandon.
Brandon’s mother, Elizabeth (J. Smith-Cameron), is a smart and warm physician who starts off believing there is no way her son could be involved in the incident. But, as more evidence comes to light, and she begins to think about the whole culture of the school — which her husband attended — Elizabeth sees the corruption of the elite class of which she has been a member all her life.
Things get so tense and there is so much anxiety on campus that one of Brandon’s friends sums up the atmosphere as, “‘Dawn of the Dead’ meets ‘A Separate Peace.’”
Aguirre-Sacasa keeps the suspense building with each new revelation, so that the play works both as a mystery and as the story of one woman’s coming to terms with the implications of wealth and social privilege in America.
Smith-Cameron is terrific and I’m sure her performance will get even stronger as she gets more performances under her belt (I saw one of the first public previews). The woman is not unlike the well-heeled character Stockard Channing played in “Six Degrees of Separation” — extremely likeable and so easy to identify with, even as we see how she has spent years pulling the wool over her own eyes.
(“Good Boys and True” is set to run through June 1. Second Stage Theatre is at 307 West 43rd St. For ticket information, call 212-246-4422)
