Theater Online - New York Theater Reviews

Carol Rosegg ©2025  Phoebe Strole (as Vera Dundee) and Billy Crudup (as Tobin Falmouth)

He may have moved on from onstage urination and full-frontal nudity, but playwright Adam Rapp continues to stir the provocative pot. In his latest, the sometimes languid yet always fascinating drama The Metal Children, he even draws from his own life to tell the story of writer Tobin Falmouth (Billy Crudup), first seen hibernating in his skeevy West Village apartment, as his concerned, fatherly agent (David Greenspan) attempts to convince him to attend an assembly in the small town where a book he wrote 12 years ago-one which shares the play's title-has been banned and taken off the shelves. (Rapp encountered a very similar event when his 1997 young adult novel The Buffalo Tree was put in similar circumstances in Reading, Penn.). Tobin, lured by an expense-paid trip, decides to go and his own personal twisted tale begins.

Tobin encounters several figures, some friends and some foes, notably a nervous teacher (Connor Barrett) who idolizes Tobin's work and uses it as assigned reading, a genial, spinsterish hotel owner (Susan Blommaert) who is reading the novel for her third time, a Christian crusader (Betsy Aidem) who deems Tobin's novel pornographic and is determined to rid the town of it, and Vera (Phoebe Strole), a 16 year-old who uses the controversy as a means to start a female-centric revolution in which she and her classmates will absorb the book's themes as a means to found a society based on its themes. And stalking Tobin are a mysterious band of goons who wear Porky Pig masks and destroy property, starting with Tobin's hotel room, defaced before he even spends a night there.

Carol Rosegg ©2025  Guy Boyd (as Otto Hurley) and Phoebe Strole (as Vera Dundee)

 In his own unruly, sometimes scattered way, Rapp's main through line is quite challenging: how responsible should a writer be for what they put out into the world“ In the stellar Act Two opener, set at at the aforementioned assembly with nearly all the players having their say on the matter, Tobin reveals that he had no deep reasons for writing the book, and that it has quite possibly been read into with too much fervor by both camps. In a bravura monologue, Tobin reveals the deep-seated (and also literal) pain that went into writing the novel, more an outcome of his shaky marriage than a dutiful act of dissention.

Crudup is somewhat miscast here (people keep saying how ragged he appears, yet the actor has never been more handsome), but overcomes such with an affecting, believably wrought performance that fully comprehends Rapp's blackly comic underpinnings. He is aided nicely by a terrific ensemble, who never succumb to patent obviousness in portraying more rural folk. Rapp's scope is much larger than mere pontificating and yokel-bashing; in fact, it is often suggested that Tobin is the least enlightened of anyone in his surroundings, too spoiled by the rigidity of his adult life in NYC to see the bigger picture.

Rapp has also directed the piece-per usual-and quite effectively, without a lot of indulgence. At two and a half hours, the play isn't exactly brisk and a few key moments are a tad overstated. Yet even so, The Metal Children is a work that gnaws on you in all the best ways; a healthy, vibrant reminder that art can beget art in distorted, surprising ways.