Letters, emails, and post-play discussions in towns and universities made me aware of how deeply this experience runs, and that my play world is inadequate to capture it. A talented and lovely/beloved actress tried to work through whether or not she could direct the HBO movie as her first film and asked me: Is there a way to make this film safe? (I replied there was not. A young girl in Los Angeles at a high school for LGBT students broke my heart when she worried that I might not accept her. There was a woman who drove up from North Carolina when she knew I would be at a dinner in New York, just to hug me and thank me. There have been friends who have told me that they could not come see my play in such an intimate public space as an Off-Broadway theatre. For me, having been honored to witness How I Learned to Drive’s impact in 1997, I track the works of art that have since been produced and continue to call power out, be it Spotlight or The Keepers. I don’t know if I will ever again write a play that connects with such a wide demographic of audience members.

#Metoo ripples through our awareness, even as older women and men face the reality that their careers, their ambitions, and their visibility have already been impacted by that power for decades.ĭo we come forward now, decades later, after our bodies, our lives, our relationships have been marked and changed by incidents long ago? Will it have impact for the young women and men, girls and boys, who endure abuses now? A man with multiple accusers sits in the White House, while a man who was banned from an Alabama shopping mall for predatory behavior has run for the United States Senate. We are in an interesting cultural moment in the United States as I write this scandals about the abuse of power through sexual manipulation and assault proliferate in social media.

Republished from American Theatre’s original post from March 2018.

The play how i learned to drive