Bennett, Alan (1934- ). The Habit of Art (2009). London: Faber and Faber, 2009. A play about the friendship between the poet W.H. Auden and composer Benjamin Britten, represented by two characters named Fitz (Auden) and Henry (Britten). The two men are meeting at Fitz’s Oxford rooms to discuss a play on which they are collaborating, and when a man named Donald (i.e. Humphrey Carpenter, who wrote biographies of both Auden and Britten) arrives to interview Fitz, he mistakes Donald for a rent boy he has hired to join them.

Bennett, Alan (1934- ). The History Boys (2004). London: Faber and Faber, 2004. In a fictitious boys’ boarding school in the north of England, two teachers with conflicting teaching philosophies clash as one is caught fondling a boy and the other is obliged to deal with his own homosexual orientation. The character of one of the teachers is based on an English schoolmaster who taught Auden. The play won multiple awards, including the Tony in 2006 for Best Play, and was a success on international tour. A study guide facilitates its use in UK schools to study issues raised in the text.

Blessing, Lee (1949- ). Lake Street Extension (1992). New York: Dramatists Play Service, 1993. A young male prostitute, living on the street and usually taking refuge in an abandoned hotel, occasionally returns home to remind his father, who had sexually abused him as a boy, that he has not forgiven him. But one day he shows up to find that his father has given his old basement bedroom to a young male refugee, a former soldier from El Salvador.

Charlton, James Martin (1966- ). ecstasy + GRACE (2001). London: unpublished, 2001. Davy, a gay Englishman and once a Salvation Army activist, is now living in Amsterdam. Jaded by disappointments and setbacks, he finds himself with a skinhead boyfriend and a job running a gay porn shop that fronts for an operation providing pedophile tourists with drugs and access to underage boys. But matters take a dramatic turn when Davy sets a client up with a thirteen-year-old whom the client deliberately murders. The play was highly controversial not only for its approach to its theme, but also because a child actor played the role of the rent boy Pullet.

Churchill, Caryl (1938- ). Cloud Nine (1979). London: Pluto Press and Joint Stock Theatre Group, 1979. Second edition, 1980. Issues of childhood sexual abuse confront men in Victorian colonial Africa and then again in London in 1979, with some of the same characters reappearing (for them, only 25 years have passed). The play conveys associations between colonial and sexual oppression and uses cross-gender and cross-racial casting to challenge gender and racial stereotypes. It has been received with critical acclaim and has been staged worldwide.

Culver, Bonnie. Group S.O.S.: the Male Version. Lexington, KY: Blue Moon Plays, 2012. Four adult male survivors of childhood sexual abuse and their counselor confront their issues and feelings as boys in a series of group therapy sessions. There is also a version of the play raising the same issues as relevant to women (S.O.S. stands for “Survivors of Sexual Abuse”). Both versions stress the importance of seeking support and challenge conventional thinking about the age of consent.

de Montherlant, Henry (1895-1972). La ville dont le prince est un enfant: 3 actes. [“The City Ruled by a Child: Three Acts”] (1963). Paris: Gallimard, 1951. English translation by Vivian Cox as The Fire That Consumes (1977). San Francisco: G.F. Ritchie, 1980. In a Catholic boys’ school outside Paris in the interwar period, a priest who feels attracted to a fourteen-year-old pupil tries to break up the boy’s intense friendship with an older boy, sixteen, but his effort is noticed and thwarted by the school’s principal, who chastises the priest that his feelings for the boy are not love, but lust. The author first conceived of this play at the age of seventeen (i.e. in 1913), and though he was not a spiritual person, his work reflects his approval of the Catholic Church for its disciplined hierarchy. When first performed in London in 1977, it won the Society of West End Theatre’s Best Play of the Year award.

Downing, Douglas, III, and Luis Garcia. Closure. Unpublished, 2007. For many college students, spring break involves physical journeys in search of parties and wild times. For Luke, however, the journey is an emotional one. His plan is to drive to his hometown to confront the man who sexually abused him as a boy. Further details are not yet available.

Eldridge, David, see Vinterburg, Thomas.

Florez, Dave. Afterbirth (2005). London: Methuen Publishing, 2005. In an uncompromising exposé on the impact of poverty on children, this debut play tells the story of Baz, a fourteen-year-old boy in London who is on home leave from foster care. He tries to make sense of his life, torn between his work as a prostitute, his adult pedophile lover, and his newborn little brother, who is being neglected by their mother, who is a heroin addict. Desperate and devoid of hope, he struggles with the dim prospects he has of ever escaping the bleak world in which he lives.

Fry, Stephen (1957- ). Latin! Or Tobacco and Boys (1980), in his Paperweight (London: Heinemann, 1992), pp. 431-70. In an English prep school, a young Latin teacher is showing special favor to a thirteen-year-old orphan student in exchange for sex. An older teacher, whose daughter has seen the two in the act, confronts the Latin teacher and offers his silence on the matter. Fry wrote the play at the age of 22 under the pseudonym “Sue Denim.”

Grimsley, Jim (1955- ). A Bird of Prey (1996), in Craig Slaight, ed., New Plays from A.C.T.’s Young Conservatory (Manchester, NH: Smith and Kraus, 1999), pp. 1-47. Monty is a boy growing up in a dysfunctional family in rural Louisiana. When his parents decide to move to a large (unnamed) city in California, the new situation challenges Monty to make sense of his own life while also trying to protect his younger siblings.

Gurney, A.R. (1930-2017). Big Bill (2003). New York: Broadway Play Publishing, 2004. In this play American tennis champion Bill Tilden (1893-1953) is presented as the consummate sportsman, completely devoted to the principle of fair play, but extremely naïve where his private life was concerned. He is unable to understand that he can’t avoid severe judgment for his sexual interest in underage boys by pleading that the victims were mature for their age, or that he never hurt or forced himself on anyone.

Harte, Jack (1944- ). Language of the Mute (2015). Dublin, Ireland: Scotus Press, 2015. In this debut play by a respected Irish novelist and short story writer, a man and a woman take their former teacher prisoner in his classroom and begin a mock trial accusing him, among other offenses, of molesting teenage boys. The play, which alternates scenes between the 1970s and 90s, refers to the case of Domhnall O’Lubhlai, who was suspected of being a sex offender but was never prosecuted. Harte, who taught with him years earlier, portrays him as a protected British informer as personal and national issues reflect one another throughout the play, in which the victims speak “the language of the mute.”

Herzog, Amy (1979- ). The Great God Pan (2012). New York: Theatre Communications Group, 2014. Jamie is a successful young journalist worried about his relationship with his girlfriend and about life in general. He meets a childhood friend, Frank, for coffee, and it turns out that Frank, who is gay, is pressing charges against his father for molesting him as a boy. The man has confessed, and Frank is advising Jamie of this because he has reason to believe that Jamie is one of his father’s other victims.

LaBute, Neil (1963- ). In a Dark House (2007). Revised off-Broadway edition. New York: Faber and Faber, 2007. A man held for observation in a psychiatric hospital asks his estranged brother to corroborate his accusations of sexual abuse many years past by his brother’s friend. It turns out that both brothers, whose lives have taken very different paths, had been abused; disclosing their mutual secrets brings them to unexpected truths about their family and the impact of childhood sexual abuse.

Loring, Kevin (1974- ). Where the Blood Mixes (2008). Vancouver, BC: Talonbooks, 2009. Floyd and Mooch, members of a First Nations tribe in British Columbia, are trading jokes and antics in a bar. The light tone of the play darkens as it emerges that both were forcibly relocated and re-educated by the Canadian government in special residential schools. The abuses at their school, including beatings, starvation, sexual abuse, and alienation from families and community traditions, have led not only to depression and alcoholism, but also to the suicide of Floyd’s wife. The play received several awards, including the Governor-General’s Award for English-Language Drama.

McLindon, James. Dusk (2007, previously entitled The Garden of Dromore). Middletown, DE: Original Works Publishing, 2007. Marie, an Irish matriarch in Cambridge, MA, must decide decide whether to accept a settlement offer from the Catholic Church or proceed to trial over a priest’s sexual abuse of her youngest son. When the trauma later led him to suicide, it was she who discovered the body; what she now needs from the Church is not money, but admission of guilt and an apology.

McVarish, Matthew (1983- ). To Kill a Kelpie (2008). Glenn Dale, MD: Stop the Silence, 2012. The day arrives that Scottish twin brothers had hoped for, and yet had dreaded for years, as together they face the issues arising from childhood sexual abuse by a man who silenced them as boys with terrifying stories about the Kelpie, a child-eating monster in the loch that uses guile to capture its innocent victims. The Kelpie is in fact a metaphor for their deceased uncle, a schoolteacher whom McVarish accuses of sexually abusing him and his brothers as boys. Originally staged in Glasgow, the play has moved on to years of great international success.

Mackay, John Henry (1864-1933). “Ueber die Stufen von Marmor. Eine Szene der namenlosen Liebe”, in his Die Bücher der namenlosen Liebe (1913), with an introduction by Hubert Kennedy. (Concord, CA: Peremptory Publications, 2005), pp. 237-54; edited and translated by Hubert Kennedy as “Over the Marble Steps: a Scene of the Nameless Love,” in John Henry Mackay, Sagitta’s Books of the Nameless Love (Concord, CA: Peremptory Publications, 2005), pp. 203-20. Walter, a sixteen-year-old German boy neglected by his parents, feels that his only source of understanding and support is Richard, a pedophile living in Venice. The teenager has already secretly seen the man several times, and now, while his wealthy parents are in Venice, he sneaks away to do so again. The play was part of a series of works Mackay wrote to promote points being argued by European pedophiles prior to the First World War.

Medugno, Richard (1959- ), and Howie Seago (1953- ). Preying Hands (2012). Lexington, KY: Richard Medugno and Howie Seago, 2014. This powerful play is a dramatization of the decades-long fight for justice by former students at St. John’s School for the Deaf in Wisconsin, who were sexually abused as boys by a priest hiding behind the charisma that made him popular among students and useful in fundraising. Medugno, who is father of a deaf child, has devoted much of his dramatic work to issues facing the hearing-impaired; Seago is a deaf actor, and performances of the play are both signed and spoken. While highlighting the unique problems encountered by deaf survivors, it orients them within the framework of the broader complexities of clergy abuse. “He was like God to you boys. You can’t fight God.”

Mitterer, Felix (1948- ). Die Beichte. Theaterstück [“The Confession: a Play”] (2004). Innsbruck and Vienna: Haymon Verlag, 2004. A man confesses to a priest that he has molested a boy, doing to him what had been done to him years previously. But then the priest himself has a confession to make, concerning sexual abuse he committed while a teacher at a monastery school. The other man realizes that the priest is talking about the same place where he had been abused for four years. Mitterer says that he was inspired to write this play, addressing clergy abuse in Austria, after viewing a three-part documentary about sexual abuse by Catholic clergy in Ireland.

Murphy, Michael. Sin (a Cardinal Deposed) (2004). New York: Dramatists Play Service, 2005. A torrent of sexual abuse revelations in the Boston Globe leads to the formal court-ordered deposition of Cardinal Bernard F. Law in 2002-2003. The documents and victim/witness testimony conclusively prove the rampant molestation of children by Catholic clergy, but it is Law’s own resistance that highlights an ecclesiastical culture of silence, entitlement, and cover-up supervised by the leader of the American Catholic Church. The text of the play is based on church documents collected by Bishop Accountability and the Boston Globe.

Neilson, Anthony (1967- ). The Lying Kind (2002). London: Methuen Publishing, 2002. In a darkly farcical treatment of a serious moral question, carrying through to the last line of the play, two doltish police officers are dispatched to a home to give a couple the tragic news of their daughter’s death in an automobile accident. While waiting at the door, however, they are accosted by an irate mother who suspects they are really there to enable the escape of a child molester. The rampant absurdity and confusion are supremely entertaining, but they come in the company of a sharp ridicule for the follies and illusions that we so often choose over the truth. The play was adapted for the French stage with a more forthright title, Les Menteurs, “The Liars” (2013).

Noone, Ronan (1970- ). The Lepers of Baile Baiste (2001). New York and London: Samuel French, 2003. In the small Irish town of Baile Baiste, a circle of single, lonely, and embittered friends regularly meets for drinks at the local pub. It emerges, however, that they were all sexually abused by a sadistic Catholic brother who has since moved on to abuse boys elsewhere. Noone, who is of Irish origin himself, wrote this play while a graduate student at Boston University and followed up with two further plays in his “Irish trilogy.” This one won several awards, including a student playwrighting award.

Pascoe, Nigel. Sleeping Dogs (2016). London: PublishNation, 2016. A man and a woman who do not know each other have come forward to raise allegations that, on separate occasions two months apart, about 25 years ago, they were sexually assaulted by a teacher at their university. Neither was a minor at the time. The woman has gone on to a successful career as a prosecutor; the man has had several failed relationships and has attempted suicide, and has now begun drinking heavily. The accused teacher is now a highly respected judge.

Prebble, Lucy (1981- ). The Sugar Syndrome (2003). New York: Dramatists Play Service, 2006. Returning home from a clinic for eating disorders, seventeen-year-old Dani goes online posing as an eleven-year-old boy. An ex-con named Tim believes and befriends her, and when he fears the police are on to him he entrusts his laptop to her. Over the protests of another Internet friend, Dani wants to believe that Tim is a good man. But then she checks the laptop. Prebble produces a witty play offering a sad commentary on how profound harm often causes people to resort to those least able to support them. She wrote this award-winning first play at the age of 22, and it has been translated into seven languages.

Reese, Oliver (1964- ). Bartsch. Kindermörder [“Bartsch: Child-Murderer”] (1992). Munich, Germany: unpublished, 1992. Jürgen Bartsch, himself a victim of clergy abuse, sexually abused five younger boys (age 8, 13, 12, 12 15) in the 1960s, when he was 15-19, and brutally murdered four of them. Arrested, convicted, and sentenced to 125 years in prison, he died during voluntary castration surgery in 1976. Reese, Head Playwright at the Ulmer Theater in Munich when he wrote this play, sought to interpret the story based on the over 250 letters Bartsch wrote from prison. Though highly acclaimed in Germany, it was received less favorably when it was staged in English as The Child-Killer: Portrait of a Paedophile, at the Edinburgh Fringe in 2003. The originally scheduled venue refused to accept it, and some critics feared that it would attract pedophiles.

Ridley, Philip (1964- ). The Fastest Clock in the Universe (1992). London: Methuen Publishing, 1992; revised edition. London: Faber and Faber, 1997; third edition. Methuen Drama, 2009. Cougar is a 30-year-old man in London’s East End who, obsessed with his youthful self-image, invites young guests to birthday parties at which he claims to be nineteen, planning to seduce them. One such guest is fifteen-year-old Foxtrot, who brings his girlfriend Sherbet, a seventeen-year-old who sees through Cougar’s deceit. The play won several awards when first staged in 1992; regarded as a modern classic, it was revived on the London stage in 2009.

Schreiber, Bea. Elm View: Screenplay. San Bernardino, CA: CreateSpace, 2015. A twelve-year-old boy repeatedly molested by the town mayor finally lashes out and assaults the man with a baseball bat, only to find that in the aftermath he is the accused party and must vindicate himself. The voices raised against him appeal to truly crazy arguments, but still, that observation counts for nothing against them. He has to relive the experiences of abuse to prove he is not the one who deserves to be jailed as a criminal. Schreiber is a seven-time Emmy Award winner.

Shanley, John Patrick (1950- ). Doubt: a Parable (2004). New York: Theatre Communications Group, 2005. A nun serving as principal of a Bronx Catholic school in 1964 is deeply suspicious of all those around her and everything they do. She is soon in deep conflict with one of her teachers, a popular priest whom she suspects of sexually abusing the school’s first African-American student. When she confronts the priest, however, he fights back. The play ends inconclusively, as so often in real life, as the priest plans to appeal to the bishop. The play won a Tony Award and the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 2005.

Silver, Nicky (1960- ). Beautiful Child (2004). New York: Dramatists Play Service, 2004. Over the decades of their marriage, Harry and Nan have become accustomed to the joys and travails of their life together and the task of presenting an acceptable face to the world. But then one day their son Isaac, an art teacher and painter and their “beautiful child,” comes for lunch and confesses that he is also living a lie and needs them to shelter and protect him. Why? He is in love with and has been having sex with one of his students, an eight-year-old boy.

Simpson, Chad G. Little Boy Blue: the Evolution of a New Script. M.F.A. thesis: University of Arkansas, 2001. Details not yet available.

Steen, David (1954- ). A Gift from Heaven (1988). New York: Samuel French, 2007. It’s summer 1954, and Ma Samuals is living in poverty in rural North Carolina with the son and daughter born to her by childhood incest two decades earlier. Messy feels unloved, largely because her mother prefers her older brother Charlie. The tensions simmering in an already dysfunctional family rise as Ma complains to Charlie, “give to me to be my man,” that it’s been a while since they’ve been “close together.”

Steinbaum, Linda Felton (1952- ). Mustang Sally (2007). New York and London: Samuel French, 2008. Friends and family know Kathy as a quiet middle school music teacher lacking in self-confidence and social skills, so they are stunned when she tells them that her affair with Sal, a thirteen-year-old boy in her class, has been discovered (she’s 31). Her principal has sent her home, and the police have been notified. Her supporters, shocked as details emerge (e.g. she’s pregnant and thinks that she and her student are in love), quickly split in their reactions and advice. The entire play is set in Kathy’s apartment and takes place over 24 hours.

Strick, Lisa W. Sometimes I Need to Say No: Assault Awareness and Avoidance for Children, Grades 1-5 (1981). Syracuse, NY: Rape Crisis Center of Syracuse, 1981. Dramatized teaching tool in which four grade-school children (two boys, two girls: they bear the names of the four Syracuse University drama students who originally played the roles) discuss and sing about topics relating to sexual safety and a child’s right to privacy in a non-threatening context. Sexual parts and acts are not mentioned.

Vinterberg, Thomas (1969- ), Mogens Rukov (1943-2015), and Bo hr. Hansen. Festen (2004), adapted for the English stage by David Eldridge (1973- ), from the 1998 Danish film of the same title. London: Methuen Publishing, 2004; definitive revised edition, 2005. The patriarch of a wealthy but dysfunctional Danish family has a tradition of inviting everyone to celebrate his birthday at his luxurious home, and for his 60th birthday he hopes that the event will help heal the wounds left by his daughter’s suicide. But at the dinner his eldest son, the deceased woman’s twin brother, discloses that their father had sexually abused both of them as children. The play has been staged in many countries worldwide since the original London production, and has won numerous awards. The release title in North America was The Celebration.

Ward, Colin. No Smoke (2014). Middletown, DE: In As Many Words Press, 2018. Four years after the failed prosecution of a social worker for molesting a fifteen-year-old boy, the case is still troubling the small Welsh town in which the events occurred. The detective is bitter at losing the case for “insufficient evidence,” and her obsession with it has contributed to the collapse of her wedding plans. The victim’s devoted but now explosively angry father has begun to drink to excess, and the situation becomes dangerous as suspicions mount that the suspect is grooming another vulnerable teenager, the earlier victim’s younger brother.

Weigh, Anthony. 2000 Feet Away (2008). London: Faber and Faber, 2008. The Iowa legislature has just passed (2005) a law banning sex offenders from living within 2000 feet of any place where children congregate, and in Eldon (the setting for Grant Wood’s famous painting American Gothic) this means anywhere in the village. Obliged to enforce the new law, Hallsy, the deputy sheriff, goes to his neighbor’s home to evict his neighbor’s eighteen-year-old son, who has been accused of statutory rape by his fourteen-year-old girlfriend’s father.