Adam Rapp: ‘The Metal Children' and Book Banning in Schools

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By Debra Lau Whelan -- School Library Journal, 05/25/2010

If you’re planning to attend this week’s BookExpo America conference in the Big Apple, don’t forget to order theater tickets. Adam Rapp’s Off Broadway play, The Metal Children, deals with a subject that’s sure to resonate with many librarians—the banning of a provocative YA novel.

Billy Crudup (left) as Tobin Falmouth and David Greenspan as his agent Bruno Binelli in Adam Rapp's play The Metal Children.
Photo: Carol Rosegg.

While some of the play is taken from Rapp’s own experiences—in 2005, Muhlenberg High School in Laureldale, PA, banned one of his YA novels, The Buffalo Tree (Boyds Mills, 1993)—the rest is mainly fiction. “Outside of Tobin Falmouth’s bout with depression and his tenacious season of insolvency,” says the 41-year-old Rapp, referring to the play’s main character (played by Billy Crudup), “very little of the play is autobiographical. I have never been married. Since I have become an author I have never slept with a teenage girl. And most importantly, the characters are all invented.”

So what’s all the fuss about? A school district in the fictitious Midwest town of Midlothia has banned Falmouth’s award-winning novel, The Metal Children, from the high school curriculum, pulled it off the school library shelves, seized copies from students, and locked the books in a sealed vault. Why? Because the novel—about a group of pregnant teens who mysteriously disappear and later reappear as bronze statues in a barren cornfield—deals with teen pregnancy and abortion.

While the district’s response ignites a raging debate over censorship, abortion, religion, and feminism, the 38-year-old Falmouth sits in his squalid Greenwich Village apartment, depressed over the fact that his writer-wife, Miranda, left him for her editor two months earlier. In fact, Falmouth can’t even remember why he wrote the book. “I wasn’t trying to say anything special,” he says in a rambling speech to the school board. “I don’t even know that I completely understand the novel.”

Adam Rapp has written seven young adult novels.

The play raises some thorny issues: Does a YA author have a moral obligation to the work he creates? Or is a work of art free from social and political consequences? In 2006, on a train ride home from a second town meeting in Reading, PA, Rapp says he began considering those questions. “I was haunted by my own lack of opinion about what our responsibility is as authors with regard to how people are perceiving our work,” says Rapp. “Even when feelings are hurt or attitudes stirred, there is this strange abstracted sense that it isn’t my fault, that the responsibility conveniently falls on the artifact”—the book—“not the artist. It made me consider this dilemma for the first time.”

In the end, it’s not clear whether Falmouth takes full responsibility for his work, but he does for having sex with a 16-year-old. And even though The Metal Children is permanently struck from the curriculum, the author does go on to write a successful adult novel.

“I hope people walk away from the theater thinking about how essential art’s place is in our culture,” Rapp says. “I hope they also come to think about how we all have a deeply personal relationship to literature and that this is very serious business. As a reader, constructing the world of the book with the author has a lasting power that can change one’s life.”

The Metal Children runs at New York City’s Vineyard Theater (108 East 15th Street) through June 13, and copies of The Metal Children: The Play (Faber and Faber, 2010) are available for sale.