Playwright: Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa. At: Kokandy Productions at Theatre Wit, 1229 W. Belmont. Phone: 773-975-8150; $22. Runs through: July 9
We could have forgiven playwright Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa recounting his boyhood experiences through the template of the comic books that made his fortune if he had chosen a superhero myth instead of "True Romance" as his prototype for this quasi-autobiographical melodrama. More puzzling, though, is its selection by Kokandy Productions as the vehicle to launch a new theater company.
Our first act locates us at a Jesuit-run academy in Washington DC circa 1988 (a date coinciding with the author's teens), where a videotape of a boy and girl engaging in rough sex is creating a citywide scandalits most distressing feature, not the atrocity of the deed, but the suspicion that the boy may have deliberately orchestrated his exposure to draw attention from his homophile activities. The authorities respond predictably: his coach attempts to keep it quiet, his mother denies his culpability and his absent father remains absent. (The sole dissenter is a rebellious aunt, who declares all gender-segregated prep schools toxic.)
Up to this point, what we have is an innocuous, if slightly shopworn, study of confused adolescents victimized by privilege, none of which prepares us for the play's second act suddenly focusing on the adults' epiphanies as they acknowledge their complicity in transforming their favored child into the amoral brat he has become following intermissionshrugging off his crimes as "no big deal", declaring that his father will "fix" everything, betraying his gay paramour in a weepy scene right out of Dumas. (The anticipation of violin music under the dialogue is so palpable that we can almost hear it in our imaginationsdid Sacasa initially write this episodic, flashback-riddled, talking-heads scenario as a teleplay?)
Saddled with such a problematic script, producer/designer/co-directors Scot T. Kokandy and Jeff Casey render an accurate evaluation of their inaugural production difficult. As with many young companies, the youthful charactersplayed, as they are, by likewise youthful actorscome off best, with Curtis Jackson and Madison McLean offering able support to Eric Casady in the role of the ambivalent "poor little rich kid." The mature personae fare less well, with Suzanne Nyhan, Laura MacGregor and John Tebbens invoking personalities overworked to the point of cliché. (Why do all fictional football coaches think they're General Patton?) It's not uncommon for flagship plays to be flawed, however, and so we must look to Kokandy's next foray into professional theater to determine its future.