The first Q The Locals show of 2026 coming up at the Queanbeyan Performing Arts Centre sounds like it’s fun, but what we’ll see on stage is anything but an innocent game, says arts editor HELEN MUSA. 

The Good Boy Game, by American playwright Patrick Vermillion, is billed as part satire, part warning and part catharsis. As a dark comedy, it is bound to be entertaining, but it’s also of the here and now as it looks at one of the serious issues of our time, the radicalisation of youth.

The production is entirely the brainchild of director/producer Caitlin Baker, known for Lord of the Flies at Canberra Rep in 2024, ACT Hub’s Seagull in 2024 and Julius Caesar in 2025. By day she works as artistic associate, development and communications at Canberra Youth Theatre.

When I catch up with Baker, I find, amazingly, that the production will be a world premiere. I say amazingly because New York playwright Patrick Vermillion has seen his plays performed at Ensemble Studio Theatre, MirrorBox, Alchemical Lab, Soho Playhouse and IRT, and The Good Boy Game was a finalist in the 2020 Eugene O’Neill awards.

That shortlisted version in 2020, Baker tells me, was one of several drafts, but in fact the play has never been produced. She found it on the New Play Exchange website, primarily intended for American playwrights to share plays at pre-publication stage.

“As a director part of my work is reading as much as I can,” Baker says. “I came across this in 2022 and I was hooked.”

Baker hasn’t met Vermillion, but she has corresponded with him extensively and is very excited that he may make it to Australia for this production.

The show, which will run just under two hours, is deeply funny yet no laughing matter, but as she says: “This is the type of thing where if you do not laugh, you will cry, so let’s laugh… Isn’t laughter a pressure valve, the tension making it easier for us to confront issues?

“My most favourite thing in theatre is where the audience is worked into a massive cackle by the scene, but then, as it goes on, the laughter turns into regret.”

Briefly, it opens with two parents, Mary-Beth and Sam (Giuliana Baggoley and Bruce Hardie), sitting at dinner when they find their son James’ (Alistair McKenzie) diary in which there are plans to shoot up his school.

Both mother and father are liberal “thinking people” who are stunned to find that their son has been taken in by ideas he finds online in the “manosphere”.

“We begin with shock. They are so stunned that James has these thoughts that they’re trying to figure out where they come from. The universal parental fear that on paper you can do everything right but things can go wrong is the base of the play,” Baker explains.

Mary-Beth and Sam decide not to call the authorities but to de-radicalise him on their own using a rewards-based points system. But they must reckon with the part they played in having created his hatred.

“As well as mother, father and son, there’s things can go wrong is the base of the play,” Baker says.

Mary-Beth’s therapist, played by Elaine Noon, hyper-protective of the mother and well-intentioned, who comes up with the system.

The play is heavy with dialogue, rather like that of Irish playwright Martin McDonagh – lightning-fast, Baker says, but bordering on the absurd except that it’s real. 

In fact, Baker has heard that authorities in the US are starting to charge the parents of school shooters.

Confronting the play may be, but it’s also really fun to do, she says. It deals with a young man and his interactions with the world around him and the slow process of radicalisation.

“To watch a young man tell his mother that he hates all women, when without women he wouldn’t exist, you could cry. Laughter lets you ask, how the hell did we get to this point?” she says.

“It’s an utterly insane play, but then again I have always loved theatre that is invested in the extremes of human existence.

“When we love our hardest, we hate our hardest.”

The Good Boy Game, The Q, Queanbeyan, June 18-20.