The Metal Children: A Play

A play about fiction’s power to both divide and unite, from Pulitzer finalist Adam Rapp

In small-town America, a young adult novel about teen pregnancy is banned by the local school board, igniting a fierce and violent debate over abortion, religious beliefs, and modern feminism. Its directionless New York City author arrives in town to defend the book and finds that it has inspired a group of local teens to rebel in strange and unexpected ways. A timely and unforgettable drama about the failure of urban and heartland America to understand each other, The Metal Children explores what happens when fiction becomes a matter of life and death.

Adam Rapp is the author of numerous plays, including the Pulitzer Prize finalist Red Light Winter, and the novel The Year of Endless Sorrows (FSG, 2006). In 2005, his young adult novel The Buffalo Tree was censored by a school board in Reading, Pennsylvania.