The Metal Children

Playwright: Adam Rapp. At: Next Theatre, 927 Noyes, Evanston. Phone: 847-475-1875; $25-$40. Runs through: May 8

Adam Rapp’s The Metal Children might be a thoroughly aggravating experience for some audiences. And that’s because Rapp refuses to reduce at the issue of school book banning to right and wrong absolutes.

Now in its Midwest premiere at Next Theatre in Evanston, The Metal Children is not an anti-censorship screed where an intellectual writer takes on a religiously small-minded town. Instead, Rapp presents a deeply flawed and drug-addled New York author who is just nonplussed when his young adult book, The Metal Children, is banned in the fictionalized small town of Midlothia due to its magical realism content involving teenage pregnancy and abortion.

Now Rapp is drawing from personal experience with The Metal Children, since his own 1997 young adult novel, The Buffalo Tree, was banned by Muhlenberg High School in Reading, Pa. And if Tobin Falmouth (a very raspy-sounding and lethargic Sean Cooper) is a stand-in for Rapp, then the whole incident becomes more an examination on how people can extremely revile or revere a text beyond the author’s original intentions.

Rapp’s moral shades of gray approach to The Metal Children offers up a welcome complexity to the issue, but he ultimately undercuts it all with outrageous plot twists that strain credibility. Take for instance the teenage vigilante forces who dress up in pig masks to enforce morality in Midlothia. Or how a group of teenage girls (led by the jarringly articulate 16-year-old student Vera of Caroline Neff) develop a pregnancy cult in Idaho dedicated to Falmouth’s novel.

Such extreme behavior would work if Rapp had gone all out with a farcical approach to The Metal Children. But Rapp grounds most everything else in a recognizable reality, so these weird flourishes feel like dramatically stylistic clashes.

At least director Joanie Schultz maintains interest throughout the Next Theatre production. And that’s even though most of the small town characters aren’t offered more in the text than to provide exposition (particularly in the case of Meg Thalken as the down-home motel manger Edith Dundee and Paul Fagen as the embattled English teacher Stacey) rather than truly complex characters.

However, what might annoy most audience members is the cipher-like meekness that Rapp writes into author Tobin Falmouth. Though Rapp explains Tobin’s self-pitying doubt and personal problems in the climactic Act II school assembly, the whole speech feels more like Tobin’s one attempt to do a book tour speech rather than an unburdening cry of help from the heart.

Though some will find Rapp’s morally complex approach to The Metal Children fascinating, others will find it more as a big failing. Either way, The Metal Children shows how the battle for the hearts and minds of American teenagers continues to rage.