Wild Animals You Should Know

I maybe wasn't suuuuuper excited to see a play about Boy Scouts and sexual abuse because, frankly, it's not the freshest topic. Molestation plays have not only been done. They've been done brilliantly: Doubt, anyone? How I Learned to Drive? What sets Wild Animals You Should Know apart, though, is that it's got a little bit more of a Lolita sensibility. The kid is definitely the pursuer. The counsellor is most resistant. But to hold onto Doubt for a second, like that play, we never know whether anything actually happened.

Sure, I can describe the play entirely in terms of how it relates to its predecessors, but there was a vague undercurrent of nastiness that kept it just fresh enough to be, if not necessary, at least entertaining. So lets just say it's the funniest molestation play you're likely to see?

Jay Armstrong Johnson plays the potential sociopath Matthew, and he's the kind of blandly good looking, sincerely charming guy that you can imagine would have been able to twist people around his finger in high school just as he does in the show. Believing that he's in high school now is slightly more challenging, but I guess casting 15 year olds as sexual aggressors whose first appearance on stage is doing a striptease to the Boy Scout motto is maybe potentially challenging. And can I take a moment to talk about how weird it is that the two biggest trends on stage this fall are plays about books and plays about teen boys having sex with adult men? well, this show is considerably more tasteful than Burning. AND less interesting. But...well, let's say that Burning might be the first show that gets a second post out of me, but that's for another time.

Meanwhile, Matthew's best friend is gay teen Jacob played to perfection by Gideon Glick who I think I've now seen in every major gig he's had. He was brilliant as the gay teen in Spring Awakening. And the gay teen in Speech and Debate. And even as the non-specifically gay teen in Spider-Man before his part was cut prior to opening. I will admit that with his strange voice and relative flamboyance, he's a specific enough performer that he will likely always be at risk of being typecast, but goddam he's good at what he does.

Matthew's mannered father, Patrick Breen, serves as a chaperone on a scouting trip along with the charming drunk Lenny. It's on this trip that Matthew confronts their scout counselor Gordon about the fact that he discovered that Gordon is gay and will out the counselor unless he admits that he finds Matthew attractive. It's an incredibly strange scene and it's here that things seem like they're really getting good because what the playwright does best is hint at the complexities and ambiguities of teendom. Sadly, he then shifts to focus on Matthew's father and the other counselor.

We come back to Matthew in the end and a really tantalizingly open to interpretation ending. Which is strong enough to send you out on a good note, not really knowing what happened, but with enough hints to be really curious about what did. And there's skill involved in that. If you're going to end on an ellipses, you need to give people enough to ponder so they aren't just unfulfilled and frustrated. And he did that. I just wish that when he did put periods on his sentences and scenes, they were just as satisfying.