With increased reports of sexual assaults on college campuses across the country, the University of Iowa’s upcoming production of Good Kids explores the complex question of what happens after a sexual assault victim comes forward.
Inspired by the 2012 Steubenville High School rape case in Ohio, Good Kids will make its debut Feb. 5, 8 p.m at David Thayer Theatre as part of the New Play Initiative created by the Big Ten Theatre Consortium.
The New Play Initiative, proposed by chair of the UI’s department of theatre arts Alan MacVey, aims to address the lack of female representation in the theater and the collaboration among the Big Ten Consortium schools. This program is the first of its kind.
“What we need to do is not only get more plays by women writers, we need to get more plays that have really great roles for women in them, especially for college-aged women,” MacVey said.
The Steubenville rape case reached national attention in 2013 after a female high school student in Ohio reported being sexually assaulted by her peers, much of which was documented on social media.
MacVey followed the coverage of the case and approached Naomi lizuka, head of playwriting at the University of California-San Diego and a 1999 visiting faculty member in the Iowa Playwrights Workshop, about writing a play centered on the topic.
Good Kids is set in a Midwestern high school and parallels the Steubenville case, with a heavy emphasis on social media’s role in similar accounts.
“Of course it is an extremely relevant topic, not just here but practically everywhere — college campuses in the country and even at the federal level,” MacVey said. “The play also deals with media –social media in particular — and how, in certain cases, it can explode information about certain things, and in this case, based on that Steubenville case, that is exactly what happened and that’s why we know about it.”
A discussion will follow each performance, led by leaders of the Rape Victim Advocacy Program (RVAP) and the Women’s Resource and Action Center (WRAC).
“There’s a lot of meaty stuff in the play,” said Susan Junis, university prevention education coordinator at RVAP. “We wanted to be able to host a space for people to have discussion about sexual assault, a safe place for people to process what they saw.”
