Playwright Adam Rapp returns with a vengeance after his
disappointing Kindness with The Metal Children, his oblique,
thrilling new play about young adult novelist Tobin Falmouth, who packs up his
self-pity and cynicism for a trip to Middle America’s Midlothia, where one of
his books has just been banned.

He’s there to assist a small band of fierce partisans, led
by the abnormally poised 16-year-old Vera, who are fighting for the book to be
allowed to be taught in the high school curriculum. Vera reads far too much
into Tobin’s book, but the fictional book’s plot could easily pass for a brainy
mystery novel: It’s about a group of pregnant teenagers disappearing, only to
be replaced by statues in a cornfield. It ends with the alliteratively named
heroine martyring herself at the statues’ feet.

Instead of a staid town hall meeting over the merits of his
book, Tobin is greeted by graffiti in his motel room, a terrified English
teacher and a roving band of vigilantes in Porky Pig masks called The Pork
Patrol.

Alternately a thriller and a cold-eyed appraisal of the way
we interpret (and misinterpret) literature, Rapp’s play manages the neat trick
of holding up both the self-proclaimed arbiters of taste (confiscated copies of
his book, which shares the play’s title, are kept in a vault in the Good Church
of Christ’s building), and the hormonal teenagers who turn books into Holy
Grails. There is more than a shade of the girls who moon over Twilight’s deadly vampire Edward, a
decades old teenager who is so in love with a girl that he fears he’ll rip her
throat out. It also mirrors Rapp’s own career: He’s written young adult
literature and had a book removed from the curriculum at Muhlenberg High School
in Pennsylvania.

No one in Rapp’s play is particularly appealing. Everyone
sympathetic to Tobin’s cause gushes with unseemliness over his prose, quoting
from his book as if it were the Bible. And the people who speak out against it
do so by quoting actual scripture, and proclaiming that things like pre-marital
sex, pregnancy and abortion shouldn’t be mentioned around teenagers.

As the leader of the group pushing to keep Tobin’s novel in
schools, Vera (an intense Phoebe Strole) paints herself gold and calmly
explains to Tobin that she and a group of girls plan to become pregnant and run
away to start a collective in Idaho. In some ways, she’s as blinkered as the
representative of the Good Church of Christ, crafting the book into something
which it could never support.

Rapp, who also directs this production, refuses easy answers
as always, preferring to keep audiences both guessing and enthralled. But The Metal Children wouldn’t work as well
as it does without Billy Crudup’s magnetic performance as Tobin. Crafty,
abrasive and acid-tongued, Crudup’s Tobin doesn’t keep people at arm’s length
so much as push them there. Yet he manages to serve as the audience’s
surrogate, bewildered by a town that seems eerily reminiscent of a Shirley
Jackson short story, where writers can be condemned by a minority and teenagers
prove themselves to be just as calculating as anyone else. Peppered with vivid
performances from a pitch-perfect cast—including David Greenspan, Betsy Aidem,
Susan Blommaert and Connor Barret—Rapp’s play is both an ode to the power of
reading and a cautionary look at what books can do when read at an
impressionable age. Smart, literate and adult, The Metal Children is the perfect antidote to the Broadway season.

The Metal Children

Through June 13, Vineyard Theatre, 108 E. 15th St. (betw.
Irving Pl. & Union Sq. East), 212-353-0303; $65.

On the same day the Archdiocese of New York announced that Monsignor Eugene
Clark had resigned after being caught having an affair with an adult woman instead of a little boy,
Mayor Bloomberg was meeting with Orthodox Jewish leaders to assure them that a herpes-ridden rabbi
wouldn’t be prevented from infecting dozens more infant boys with a disease that will follow them
the rest of their lives.

Last February, as you’ll recall, the Health Dept. was investigating
Rabbi Yitzchok Fischer. A child had recently died after being infected with herpes during an ancient
circumcision rite in which the rabbi sucked the blood from the tiny wounded penis. Several other
boys, it turns out, had also been infected.

City Council moved to ban Rabbi Fischer from performing the ritual,
but this raised a ruckus in the Orthodox community, whose leaders claimed that such a ban would “set
a bad precedent.”

A bad precedent for what, exactly? There had been no move to prevent
the ritual from taking place—just to keep this one diseased man from performing it.

Not to worry, though. The Mayor, desperate for the Orthodox vote this
election year, assured the rabbis that nothing like that would happen—and to hell with all
those kids, anyway.