dramaturgy | (no subject)

Interesting things. First there was an interview with Phoebe Strole (♥) about... well, things in general, but about her experience with Adam Rapp's new play The Metal Children which I kind of wish I'd jumped at seeing before I left New York. It's a good interview, but it linked to something I liked even more: an essay by Adam Rapp about his experience with censorship of his works and how that became The Metal Children:

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 Books 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 of shelves, 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 he 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 things 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...

One brave student approached a lectern, which was placed in the enter [sic] aisle of the church, and confronted the head of the school board, asking him why he felt he could make decisions about what kids were capable of processing with regard to sex and violence when he’d never even spoken to one single student and had little or no presence in the high school. About a hundred students stood up and cheered, and the hair on the back of my neck stood up. A standing ovation at the curtain call doesn’t even come close to what I felt in that moment.

It's an awesome essay, talking about how works have a life of their own after the author puts forth a finished product (I kind of get it -- I raise my eyebrows at how many reviews one of my stupid little Harry Potter fics has gotten in the last six months when I wrote it six years ago, and why people keep favoriting my only Firefly fic¹) and I love how this is a topic that is clearly close to his heart and experience -- I think that is what the best art is made of.

1 Not to compare my own fanworks to Adam Rapp's brilliance, of course.