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His aim is True
A comic-book scribe goes back to school.
Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa wants to make it clear: He did not hate high school.
The playwright, whose new work Good Boys and True opens at Steppenwolf this month, has some things in common with Brandon Hardy, the high-school senior at the center of the play. Aguirre-Sacasa, like Brandon, attended an exclusive, Jesuit-run Washington, D.C.–area prep school (Brandon goes to the fictional St. Joe’s; Aguirre-Sacasa graduated from Georgetown Prep), and both played football. But unlike Brandon, Aguirre-Sacasa never witnessed the fallout from a sex scandal.
“One of the things that the cast and the director have asked me [is], ‘How was your high-school experience?’ ” says the playwright, laughing. “In fact I look back on it very fondly. Some of the first teachers who really influenced me, who encouraged me to write, were at this prep school, but I guess if you just see the play you’re like, ‘Wow, he didn’t have such a great time.’ ”
Aguirre-Sacasa has been known to draw from his own life before. The gay, New York–based playwright also works for Marvel Comics, where he’s written for Spider-Man and the Fantastic Four and is developing a noirish title about the Black Cat, Spider-Man’s jewel-thief-with-a-heart-of-gold ex-girlfriend, as well as a horror series with the cult-favorite Man-Thing. It’s no coincidence that his play Based on a Totally True Story has a gay, New York–based comic-book writer and playwright as its lead, or that his Golden Age features a cast of characters suspiciously similar to the Archie gang.
The more grounded Good Boys might seem a departure, but Aguirre-Sacasa believes there’s a common thread. “A lot of my stuff has pulpier elements, you know—heavily influenced by comic books and horror movies, sci-fi stories, things like that,” he says. In those genres “you have to make the plot work a certain way so that you are always ahead of the audience. Even though some of my other plays do have monsters from the ocean or aliens or whatever, they kind of wrestle with the same themes of family.”
Though it revolves around an indecent videotape (it’s set in the pre-YouTube era of the late 1980s), Good Boys is largely about the strained relationship between Brandon and his mother, Elizabeth, who serves as our entry to the school’s elite environment. “It started out as a two-person play about [Brandon] and his best friend,” Aguirre-Sacasa says. “The world of the play started getting bigger, and eventually Elizabeth felt like the most interesting, richest character to explore: looking at the play through an outsider, someone who didn’t go to the school.”
“Places like the boys’ locker room and the field house—my mom never went to those places when I was at Georgetown Prep,” he continues. “I think these kinds of scandals erupt in these hothouse environments, these places of privilege that are hermetically sealed from the rest of the world. It felt like it might be great to have someone [Elizabeth] who was least equipped to wrestle with these issues” as his protagonist.
Steppenwolf artistic director Martha Lavey plays Elizabeth, and she’s joined by three of the city’s up-and-coming twentysomething actors in Stephen Louis Grush, Tim Rock and Kelly O’Sullivan. (New York talent Pam MacKinnon directs, switching places with originally slated director Amy Morton, who’s since gone to Broadway to perform in August: Osage County.)
“Ed Sobel [Steppenwolf’s director of new play development] called me and said, ‘Roberto, you’re going to love these kids,’ ” Aguirre-Sacasa recalls. “I love all the actors, but I remember specifically he said about Kelly O’Sullivan, ‘If you don’t love her, we can’t even be friends anymore.’ And even from the first read she knocked my socks off.”
The playwright also works in television, having joined the writing staff of Big Love for its third season. In October he sold a pilot, developed under Salma Hayek’s production company, to Fox. The pilot marks a return to Aguirre-Sacasa’s comic-book stylings: It’s about a female werewolf. But the Hollywood writers’ strike put a temporary halt to his TV work, with “the silver lining,” as he says, of allowing him to spend more time in Chicago on the play.
Good Boys and True is in previews and opens December 21.
