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Shows Worth Seeing:
The Metal Children
By Adam Rapp
Vineyard Theatre
108 15th St.
Box office: (212) 353-0303
Adam Rapp’s new play, The Metal Children, is a
fascinating contribution to a debate about art and moral responsibility
that has been raging, unresolved, for more than 2500 years. It
tells the tale of a New York writer named Tobin Falmouth (played
with appropriate slacker self-pity by Billy Crudup) whose provocative
young-adult novel about disappearing pregnant girls has been banned
by a Midwestern school board. At the prodding of his unctuous
agent (played by David Greenspan), Tobin travels to the town to
defend himself and finds not only the expected pious kooks and
bloodthirsty thugs out to harass and lynch him but also a real
problem. The book has actually incited a group of teenage girls
to declare their independence by becoming pregnant and running
away from home—deeply questionable behavior that puts Tobin
on the spot much more than he bargained for. This story twist,
which involves the author personally in the dubious actions his
book provokes, transforms The Metal Children from a sensationalist
amusement into a smart and probing parable.
Like Martin McDonagh’s
The Pillowman, Rapp’s play harks back to the dispute
between Plato and Aristotle over whether drama (in this case a
novel) necessarily causes copycat bad behavior. To his enormous
credit, Rapp sees this debate from both sides. The traditional
critique of Plato’s argument is that he writes as though
audiences were children prone simply to imitate what they read
and see. Adults supposedly know better, and understand that they
should compare what they read and see with their stock of worldly
knowledge and thus learn from art. Rapp cleverly immerses Tobin
in a nightmare scenario where children are his audience,
and the question of protecting them can’t just be swept
under the rug. This is what McDonagh did in The Pillowman,
using the police in a totalitarian state to confront a writer
with the imitative violence he caused among children, but that
play became preoccupied with sensationalism and essentially dropped
the moral debate. Rapp too indulges in gore—enough to lead
him into plot contrivance at times, actually—but he thinks
through the moral debate much more completely than McDonagh did
and thus gives his play punch and coherence. The Metal Children
seems to say that if we urbane sophisticates really want to defend
Art persuasively in a culture mistrustful of it, we might start
by admitting that it can be dangerous, and that handling it safely
requires grownup behavior from all parties. That is not a revolutionary
statement, but it is a brave one.
