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    Theatre Review: OSU’s Good Kids’ Reach Far Exceeds its Grasp

    The Big Ten Theatre Consortium’s New Play Initiative is designed to help correct some ugly imbalances that are frequently shrugged off as just the way of the world in the theatre community. A commissioning grant to create new work by playwrights who are women featuring at least seven major roles for women, with guaranteed productions by schools in the Big Ten in the plays’ first year of existence before being made available to other non-profit and professional theatres, it’s a great first step. Good Kids by Naomi Iizuka opened at OSU this week after previous productions at Maryland, Michigan, Iowa and Indiana, among other schools (OSU previously performed Kirsten Greenidge’s Baltimore from the same initiative in a cold reading).

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    Jack Kelliher as Connor and Alexandra Davis as Chloe in a scene from The Ohio State University Department of Theatre’s production of Good Kids. (Photo by Matt Hazard).
    Jack Kelliher as Connor and Alexandra Davis as Chloe in a scene from The Ohio State University Department of Theatre’s production of Good Kids. (Photo by Matt Hazard).

    Good Kids is an exceptionally timely and relevant play, based on the horrific Steubenville High School rape case of 2012 that brought into focus how much social media has changed perceptions (and provided evidence), how the speed of dissemination makes it easier to know what happened, and somehow harder to believe in such a thing as objective truth. At the same time, the play never transcends word salad, platitudes, and clichés. It never goes quite deep enough, never stabs with a sharp enough knife, and its look at the banality of evil just ends up banal.

    Good Kids is set in a small, declining town “Along the highway going somewhere else” and aside a river. It orbits around a party thrown by students at the town’s lone High School. The three popular girls are led by Amber in a terrific performance by Sara Lorraine Perry that’s all fangs and a hunger for escape. Amber says with ominous portent early, “You know what I love about parties? The sense of possibility.” Hovering around, and being tolerated by, the popular kids, is Kylie (Elisabeth Rogge), a new student with a vested interest in at least not slipping down the social ladder. Having opted out of their social structure, and therefore dangerous, is Skyler (a charming Jasmine Michelle Smith) who serves as observer, catalyst, sometime narrator and moral compass. The other two girls in the principal action are Chloe (Alexandra Davis) and Daphne (Myia Eren), outsiders from a neighboring town come to the party because Chloe is Kylie’s cousin.

    The boys here are all members of the football team, The Mustangs, with all the entitlement that brings. They cluster around Connor (Jack Kelliher), the golden boy of the moment being recruited by colleges, and Ty (a stunning Zak Bainazarov) shown as just shy of a sociopath. Chloe is seen getting drunk at the party, causing largely good-natured hell and arousing the ire of the popular girls before leaving in a truck with the four football players and being horribly assaulted.

    Moving through and around this action is a wheelchair bound hacker and blogger with a deep, vested interest in what happened. Linnea Bond’s Deidre is a composite of Alexandria Goddard and members of Anonymous. As she says, “I am karma,” she represents the ability of the Internet to galvanize people for good and split circled wagons, to shine light and force remembering of ugly darkness.

    Through what feels like a long 90 minutes, these characters move and talk in circles around Brad Steinmetz’s (with assistant Brigette Beidenbach) minimal set with a pickup truck at its center and a ring of beige carpet echoing the basement of both the party and where the rape happens. Mandy Fox’s assured direction keeps everything moving at a strong clip and makes great use of the video backdrop (courtesy of Media Designer Alex Oliszewski).

    Linnea Bond as Deidre, Jack Kelliher as Connor and Alexandra Davis as Chloe in a scene from The Ohio State University Department of Theatre’s production of Good Kids. (Photo by Matt Hazard).
    Linnea Bond as Deidre, Jack Kelliher as Connor and Alexandra Davis as Chloe in a scene from The Ohio State University Department of Theatre’s production of Good Kids. (Photo by Matt Hazard).

    The play stumbles on a noble fidelity to the facts of the case as we know them. The characters use repetition to hammer home the same clichés again and again. No one quite shirks their stock casting High School comedy summaries but it also doesn’t use those archetypes to enhance the horror and ugliness. It never decides if these characters are people or ciphers and so ends up not using them well as either. The attempts to bring the outside world into the frame of the show are it’s weakest moments with a funny-voice parade of parents and coaches in the media spotlight and a baffling “good old days” fantasy with not quite enough irony as a prelude to a discussion of hookup culture. Its use of fragmented time and metatheatrical jumps in space (often initiated by Bond’s Deidre shouting “pause” and/or “rewind”) frequently feels cheap, a shortcut to avoid sufficiently dramatizing scenarios.

    Good Kids shines when it eases off the throttle, as in a quiet, devastating exchange between Chloe and Daphne about the former’s lack of memory, and when it lets Fox’s direction play with abstraction as with a harrowing depiction of the assault that’s all oozing red light, shadows and a glimpsed body in video. And despite the clunky dialogue, the actors almost universally rise to the challenge. Bond’s bracing anger, skepticism, and righteousness are a delight to watch, Davis is heartbreaking and nuanced, and Kelliher is a nigh-perfect study in hubris and collapse.

    We need art that engages the atmosphere of the here and now. Some things are important enough we need to be lectured about them. Sometimes we deserve an ugly, direct address. But there’s a fine line to walk in making that kind of polemic theatre and Good Kids is too fatiguing and with too little insight. There’s nothing here we haven’t seen before.

    Good Kids runs through November 1 with performances at 7:30pm Wednesday through Saturday and 3:00pm on Sundays. For tickets and more information, visit https://theatre.osu.edu/events/good-kids

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    Richard Sanford
    Richard Sanfordhttp://sanfordspeaks.blogspot.com/
    Richard Sanford is a freelance contributor to Columbus Underground covering the city's vibrant theatre scene. You can find him seeking inspiration at a variety of bars, concert halls, performance spaces, museums and galleries.
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