6 days Ago By Jesse Green
The first word spoken in “ ,” a vital new play in a thrilling production at the Booth Theater on Broadway, is “sex.” Defining the word is part of a six-week sex education unit at a rural Georgia high school that doesn’t want to teach it. Just 10 minutes a day is all it gets, and those minutes consist mostly of reading a textbook aloud, in imperfect unison that makes it sound like mush.
The 16- and 17-year-old girls in the class know all about sex anyway. Even in their conservative, one-stoplight community — one’s father is the preacher at the Baptist church most of the others attend — they’ve “done some stuff,” or at any rate have obsessed over Lorde and practiced Talmud on Taylor Swift. It is in this hormonal, repressive environment, in 2018, just a year since , that the playwright, Kimberly Belflower, sets the action.
But the girls who want to start a feminism club, which the school resists as “a tricky situation,” do not need hashtags to understand sexual predation. Some have already lived it. Raelynn, the preacher’s daughter, has a purity ring but also an ex-boyfriend who, trying to win her back, forces her to have what he later calls a “conversation.
” “Do you mean like when you threw a desk on the ground and kiss-raped me?” she asks. Others have experienced worse. But even for those who have thought little about the subject, the world is about to change, as their lit teacher, the golden Mr.
Smith, embarks on a unit about “The Crucible.” Excitedly he tells them that the Arthur Miller classic, an allegory of McCarthyite witch hunts set in 17th-century Salem, Mass., is “a great play about a great hero.
” Once they start reading it, they beg to differ. We are having trouble retrieving the article content. Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.
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