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It’s
risky, spending two years working on the play that came about because I overheard a woman say:
He’s
coming home now, after serving his two years for touching that girl. They say
he’s cured. I just want everything to be the way it was.
Who is this woman? Who would stay after something like this?
Who was the famly? How would the community react? There was much
in the news about pedophilia, and, of course, there continues to be. We are, as a society, fascinated with the problem
because (as the New York Times Magazine (1/23/05) pointed out) the problem seems intractable. Megan's Law is
now a part of almost every community in the nation, the Catholic church continues to deal with its scandal, and the fear engendered
by "the pedophile next door" now seems almost universal. The Kevin Bacon film The Woodsman focuses on the potentially
redeeming quality of a pedophile's relationships with a "good woman." My play, Half Life, takes a different tack.
In the kind of explosion produced by a married pedophile -- the incident, getting caught, getting tried, service a prison
sentence -- there is fallout of nuclear proportions.
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Looking
at family relationships under the crucible of stress means that every action – from making love to shopping to having
friends over for dinner – resonates with enormous significance.
Half
Life logo by Creative Source, Inc. New York
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Why HALF LIFE?
The title
refers to one of the definitions of the phrase half life: the amount of time it takes a radioactive substance to fall to half
its original value. The half life of plutonium, for instance – the substance
generated as so-called 'nuclear waste' in atomic power plants – is 10,000 years.
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The Elephant on the Coffee Table
At my worst moments my bad internal voices intoned,
“Who will want to see the play about the pedophile?” I’m glad
I persevered, because ultimately the play is about relationships – about love, forgiveness, and the potent effect of
denial. The play is about marriage, about husbands and wives, about fathers (and
mothers) and daughters, about the true meaning of friendship, about secrets. But it is also, of course, about a pedophile
– charming, engaging, and because of that, doubly dangerous.
For me, writing is about risk, about saying the unsayable, about naming the “elephant on the coffee table,”
and describing it in as much detail as possible. But to be risky without being
dramatic would be to do a disservice to the form.
A play needs suspense. The characters need arcs; they need to breathe; the audience needs to recognize them and engage with their
problems. And, ultimately, for the play to work, the audience needs to be moved
– shaken, stirred, changed.
Links to websites about pedophiles and sexual predators:
http://www.uspacs.org/, http://childsafenetwork.org, http://www.crimelibrary.com/criminal_mind/psychology/pedophiles/1.html
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