Theatre Northwest to present performance of ‘Good Kids’ online Nov. 17-18

Good Kids promotion

Theatre Northwest will present “Good Kids” – an exploration of a casual sexual encounter gone wrong and its public aftermath – as the next play in its 2020-2021 mainstage season.

The performance will be available for 24 hours from noon on Tuesday, Nov 17, until noon on Wednesday, Nov. 18, via Broadway-on-Demand. Tickets are $10, and all proceeds go toward student scholarships.

Set in a Midwestern high school, in a world of Facebook and Twitter, smartphones and YouTube, “Good Kids,” written by Naomi Iizuka, explores rape culture, the impact social media has on the victims of sexual assault, and the concept that “memory is a broken machine.”

Narrated by a mysterious figure, the play has a non-linear timeline and fast forwards and rewinds through the events surrounding the assault. All the students and adults depicted in the story react in different ways, causing the audience to examine their own viewpoints and biases on the topic. 

“Good Kids” is based on the true story of a sexual assault and its aftermath in 2012 in Steubenville, Ohio, where two 16-year-old high school football players were convicted in juvenile court for the rape of a minor. Although evidence of the incident in the form of video and photos taken by the students involved was widely disseminated on social media, it divided the community and caused controversy. The incident galvanized a national conversation about rape and rape culture.

The play has been produced at hundreds of universities and colleges throughout the country since its publication in 2015. It was the first commissioned by the Big Ten Theatre Consortium’s New Play Initiative, a collaboration of Big 10 university theatre departments to commission, produce and publicize new plays by female playwrights, with the goal of creating strong female roles.