FEATURE  |  July 3, 2007

Dan O’Brien’s The Dear Boy:

Dan O’Brien’s play, The Dear Boy, had already been accepted for a May 2007 publication in Blackbird's Gallery when news came of the shootings at Virginia Tech. Though the play in no way mirrors the scope and horror of that event, a threat to a teacher in the action of the play led us to delay its publication until now. In light of the events at Tech, we asked Dan O’Brien to provide a few comments on the origins of his play. Here are his remarks, and The Dear Boy in four scenes in Gallery.

—The Blackbird Editors

	Program Cover, The Dear Boy Second Stage Theatre August 2005

The Dear Boy was written a few years ago, when I was remembering some teachers who seemed to dislike me unfairly, comically even, and trying to imagine the student I’d been, someone who might invite, if not deserve, their disdain. Both characterizations, teacher and student, and the events of the play, have been of course dramatized.

I wrote The Dear Boy while living in the woods on a year-long fellowship at the University of the South in Sewanee, Tennessee. It is a beautiful place. This was my first attempt to write about my childhood and the town I grew up in. So, in terms of setting, mood, and emotional meaning, the play is very close to autobiography.

This play may make some people think of the recent murders at Virginia Tech: the student whose emotional life is a question mark, the gun in the knapsack, the upsetting mess of the student’s poems and plays. I don’t pretend to know anything about the life of the murderer and his family (if anything, the threat in my play is one of suicide); and the events at Virginia Tech announce really, once more, that age-old problem of evil, a problem to make any preface-writing playwright throw up his hands. But there is, as everyone knows, a kinship between violence and creating. Why do some abused children grow up to be criminals, and others to be artists of some sort (or tax attorneys, laborers, or English teachers)? The difference may be one of luck, or expression, of finding a way to speak and, more importantly perhaps, someone to listen. Which is why The Dear Boy ends on a hopeful note, in its small way perhaps romantically.

Dan O’Brien
June 3, 2007   

Introduction           Title Page & Notes                     Scene 1                    Scene 2                Scene 3                    Scene 4

Next

   Contributor’s notes   

return to top