Good Boys and True

If America’s ivy leagues are a place you can buy your way into, you might call Good Boys and True a consumer-reports play. Set in 1988 Washington, D.C.—a city in which the politicos’ type A personalities and tidy ambitions seem to infect the civilians like smallpox—Good Boys looks at the impact of a sex scandal on an otherwise blemish-free prep-school student, whose cushy legacy status should buffer him from trouble. (Young Grush has gravitas to spare, even as a high-schooler.) When his rationalist mother and true-blue, on-the-sly boyfriend (bright and vulnerable Rock) catch wind, the boys’ prep school is revealed to be less Goodbye, Mr. Chips than Oz.

None of Aguirre-Sacasa’s observations about the American caste system break ground. But many are more than credible, as when Lavey (deliciously transmuting her pragmatic public persona into a sinewy, tough mama) chats awkwardly with a mall food court employee. Unfortunately, the real villain remains offstage throughout; given the “simmer” setting MacKinnon keeps the play on for the entire two hours, you keep wishing he’d appear to blow the lid off. More distractingly, the playwright briefly borrows elliptical time-frame devices from the likes of Donald Margulies and Richard Greenberg, only to quickly return them with Steppenwolf’s coffee-mug stains on them. Also, a single Rubik’s Cube prop does not an ’80s play make.

But Good Boys takes its sensitivity to economic privilege seriously. Instead of the wealthy bitching about their plight—the primary trend of nonprofit plays in the past decade—here they keep pointedly quiet about it. There are frightening consequences for that, too, the playwright shows us; the things for which prep school really preps you are pretty scary.