The Metal Children: A Play

by Adam Rapp

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780865479241
Publisher:	Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Publication date:	04/13/2010
Edition description:	Original
Pages:	128
Product dimensions:	5.40(w) x 8.10(h) x 0.60(d)

About the Author

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 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 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.

Read an Excerpt

Metal Children, The

ACT I

CHARACTERS

TOBIN FALMOUTH, a novelist in his late thirties, disheveled, adrift

 

BRUNO BINELLI, a feisty gay Italian-American book agent, mid-forties

 

KONG, a teenage male pot dealer; a skater punk homeboy

 

LYNNE, a woman of fifty who likes to party; tired

 

EDITH DUNDEE, a woman in her fifties who runs a roadside motel; sweet

 

STACEY KINSELLA, a progressive high school English teacher in his mid-thirties, at once fearless and terrified

 

VERA DUNDEE, a young woman of sixteen; a precocious visionary

 

COOPER, a young woman of sixteen; Vera's second-in-command

 

BOY IN PORKY PIG MASK, a teenage boy; a bully

 

OTTO HURLEY, a civic leader with a big booming voice, fifties

 

TAMI LAKE, a young Christian woman of sixteen, God-fearing

 

ROBERTA CUPP, a community leader of the Christian right, mid-forties; a widow

 

NURSE, a young woman with a firm bedside manner

 

BOY X, a high school freshman with an unusually high sperm count; eager to please

Copyright © 2010 by Adam Rapp

Editorial Reviews

An ambitious and prodigiously talented writer.” —Charles Isherwood, Variety on Adam Rapp

“[Rapp] shows an exuberant love for the written word . . . [He] tells stories that encase classical themes—class and envy, ambition and alienation—in blunt terms and in modern settings.” —Jesse McKinley, The New York Times on Adam Rapp

“Rapp . . . is a gifted storyteller. He makes demands on his audience, and he rewards its close attention with depth and elegance.” —John Lahr, The New Yorker on Adam Rapp

From the Publisher