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    The Metal Children: A Play
    The Metal Children: A Play
    The Metal Children: A Play
    Ebook112 pages1 hour

    The Metal Children: A Play

    By Adam Rapp

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    About this ebook

    A play about fiction's power to both divide and unite, from Pulitzer finalist Adam Rapp

    In small-town America, a young adult novel about teen pregnancy is banned by the local school board, igniting a fierce and violent debate over abortion, religious beliefs, and modern feminism. Its directionless New York City author arrives in town to defend the book and finds that it has inspired a group of local teens to rebel in strange and unexpected ways. A timely and unforgettable drama about the failure of urban and heartland America to understand each other, The Metal Children explores what happens when fiction becomes a matter of life and death.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherMacmillan Publishers
    Release dateApr 13, 2010
    ISBN9781429995948
    The Metal Children: A Play
    Author

    Adam Rapp

    Adam Rapp is an OBIE Award-winning playwright and director, as well as a novelist, filmmaker, actor, and musician. His play The Purple Lights of Joppa Illinois had its world première last month at South Coast Repertory. His other plays include Red Light Winter (Citation from the American Theatre Critics Association, a Lucille Lortel Nomination for Best New Play, two OBIE Awards, and was named a finalist for the 2006 Pulitzer Prize), Blackbird, The Metal Children, Finer Noble Gases, Through The Yellow Hour, The Hallway Trilogy, Nocturne, Ghosts in the Cottonwoods, Animals and Plants, Stone Cold Dead Serious, Faster, Gompers, Essential Self-Defense, American Slingo, and Kindness. For film, he wrote the screenplay for Winter Passing; and recently directed Loitering with Intent. Rapp has been the recipient of the 1999 Princess Grace Award for Playwriting, a 2000 Roger L. Stevens Award from the Kennedy Center Fund for New American Plays, the 2001 Helen Merrill Award for Emerging Playwrights, and Boston’s Elliot Norton Award; and was short-listed for the 2003 William Saroyan International Prize for Writing, received the 2006 Princess Grace Statue, a 2007 Lucille Lortel Playwriting Fellowship, and the Benjamin H. Danks Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

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      Book preview

      The Metal Children - Adam Rapp

      INTRODUCTION

      In the spring of 2005, I received a call from Bruce Weber of The New York Times telling me he was about to travel to Reading, Pennsylvania, where my young adult novel The Buffalo Tree had caused a bit of a stir. The novel, published by Front Street in 1997, was a part of the English curriculum at Muhlenberg High School, and a young woman, purportedly puppeteered by a local Christian group, quoted passages from the novel containing sexual content and foul language in front of the local school board. The book was immediately pulled off the shelves and wrested from student hands, and all copies were banished to a large vault.

      Mr. Weber told me there was going to be a town meeting to discuss the improper procedure implemented in banning the book. He said that the major players on both sides would be present and asked me if I was going to attend. This was certainly a shock to me. I couldn’t go. I was in Chicago and about to start tech rehearsals for the world premiere of my play Red Light Winter at Steppenwolf. We’d only had three and a half weeks of rehearsal and I was directing. This isn’t much time to get a production up to speed, and I told Mr. Weber as much. He called me from the meeting and put one of the students on the phone with me. She had apparently stood up in front of her community and offered her copy, which she owned, to the library so that other kids could continue reading the book. She was extremely excited to talk to me, and I was moved to tears.

      Incidentally, Red Light Winter opened without a glitch, and all was good in Chicago. Bruce Weber went on to publish an article about The Buffalo Tree and the controversy at Muhlenberg High School in The New York Times. The book remained off the reading list, which saddened me. I was grateful that he gave the matter so much attention. I cut the article out of the newspaper and put it all behind me.

      A year later, that same community in Pennsylvania called for another meeting to discuss where things were at with regard to the book, how the decision to keep it off the reading list affected students and teachers, and how the whole experience was possibly changing the way reading materials were selected for English class. I was contacted by the courageous progressive teacher who was leading the charge in favor of The Buffalo Tree, and he invited me to be part of the conversation. I agreed to come, and when I arrived in Reading, I met with all the major players on both sides of the issue. There was a dinner at the house of the provost of the local college. It was all very civil. The food was good. I was nervous.

      The actual meeting was held in a Lutheran church. There was a large banquet table set up on the altar, with pitchers of water and Styrofoam cups. Organ music was played while people filed in. I was placed at the center of the table. On either side of me were people who either loved or hated the book. The plan was to hear the various points of view of the people seated at the table, and then the public would have an opportunity to ask questions and share their opinions.

      When I was asked to speak, I did so from a pulpit. No one else had to do that, but it was offered to me and I took it. I had nothing prepared. I heard myself saying things about never wanting to hurt anyone and not having any real intentions for the book beyond telling the story of a young boy who was trying to survive his brief but brutal stay in a reform school. I felt like I was speaking passionately, but I also felt far away from my own material. I’d written the book in 1995, after all—eleven years earlier. I remembered the characters’ names and most of the significant action. I told the audience I really had been interested in writing about survival and mercy and loyalty; that it was a violent world I was dealing with, but no more violent than the stuff we see in the streets, on TV, on the Internet. I told them how hard it had been to write the book; that it was personal, drawn from some of my own experiences when I was sent to reform school for half of the fifth grade. But with many of the specifics in the novel, there was a kind of amnesia at play, and it was this memory loss that haunted me as I took the train back to New York.

      I started to think about how a piece of art, specifically a work of literature, can have its own life. The book itself—the artifact—can gain a power completely independent of that of its creator. The Buffalo Tree received some nice reviews when it was published, and it went on to be named a 1997 School Library Journal Best Book for Young Adults, but it was by no means a bestseller. It has managed to stay in print, but my royalty checks—the few that I’ve seen for it—can barely pay my rent. I moved on from that novel and wrote more. And I’ve written plays and a few films and television scripts. I was stunned that the book was causing such a mess eleven years after the first printing. And I was sad that the book had drifted from my

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