New play seeks dark humor under the ordeal of sex cult Sarah Lawrence
New York City actress Carson Marie Earnest recently stumbled across a casting call for a “darkly funny, two-act cautionary play based on the true story of Larry Ray and the ‘sex cult’ at Sarah Lawrence College.”
“Oh my God, I know this story,” thought Mrs. Earnest, who had been shocked to hear the news several years earlier broke in 2019 just as she was due to graduate from the school just north of town.
“Everyone was talking about it,” Ms. Earnest said. She soon learned that a writing teacher at Sarah Lawrence, Melvin Jules Bukiet, had written the piece with one of his former students, Finnegan Shepard.
“The conditions were intrinsically dramatic,” Mr Bukiet said. “It just felt like it wanted to be on a stage.”
And so “Runts” opens Monday at the Teatro Latea on the Lower East Side as part of the New York Theater Festival.
Mr. Bukiet called the play “loosely based” on reality: it is set in a leafy liberal arts college near New York City, and the plot largely reflects how Mr. her suitemates took over. .
The production has no formal connection to the college. But coincidentally, six out of 10 people involved do, from the director, Oliver Conant, a college graduate, to the lighting technician, who is a current student.
Mr. Bukiet wrote the piece without consulting Sarah Lawrence’s records, who probably preferred the story not resurface, and had no comment on this article.
Mr Bukiet thinks his tenure will protect his job – “At least I hope so” – but added: “I’m not going to stand under windows outside the administration building. That’s for sure.”
Some of Mr. Ray’s victims objected to their labor pains becoming fodder for a play billing itself as “darkly funny.”
Daniel Barbara Levinnow a writer in Los Angeles who published a book about his experience, called the production a “treacherous” revictimization. After suffering from Mr. Ray, he said, “It’s hard for me to hear about a Sarah Lawrence teacher, a representative of Sarah Lawrence, taking more from us.”
“It’s enough to be tortured, but when people exploit our trauma further, it just duplicates the experience of our lives being stolen again,” he said.
Mr Bukiet said the true story was just a “spark” for a dramatic exploration of “how susceptible humans can be”.
He avoided examining the details “because I didn’t want the reality of it to invade my imagination”, saying he was confident the piece would deepen a viewer’s empathy.
In a recent rehearsal, the actors went through scenes, starting with the main character, Zander Bay, a tough guy with a shady past, who showed up and moved into his daughter Jane’s dorm room. of jail and needing a couch to crash into.
Like Mr. Ray, Zander is a master manipulator who works his way into the minds of vulnerable students. Through counseling sessions and ‘family gatherings’ he forces them into sex, theft and prostitution.
Contestants in the production said they expected Sarah Lawrence graduates to be a large part of the audience.
“We were all drawn to this because it’s a therapeutic way to discuss the situation,” Ms Earnest said, acknowledging that the discomfort remains.
“I still feel a little bit of that trepidation in rehearsal,” she said. “I am nervous about portraying the story in the right way, especially because I have that connection with the school.
“I don’t want to represent Sarah Lawrence negatively,” she added. “It was a great place and I’m glad I went there.”
Her college familiarity helped her embody Jane, a role she auditioned for because of her fascination with Talia Ray: “How could anyone let their father do this?” she said.
Zander is played by Jack Coggins, a school teacher from Hoboken, NJ, whose son Sarah Lawrence attended. “I’m going from trying to be the ideal Sarah Lawrence parent to being the most evil one imaginable,” Mr. Coggins said.
He said Mr. Ray was “definitely conscious” when he saw the casting for a manipulative, Rasputin-esque “bad dad”. He auditioned just days before Mr. Ray was sentenced in January.
“It helped that I knew Sarah Lawrence because I could see how someone could become a wolf in sheep’s clothing and remain anonymous for a long time without being discovered by the administration,” he said.
The director, Mr. Conant, said his son, who graduated shortly after Mr. Ray was on campus, liked the play. But his mother, Miriam Bernheim Conant, 91, who taught political theory to Sarah Lawrence for 40 years, was “shocked.”
“She said, ‘Isn’t this just dirty laundry?'” he said.
“From the school’s perspective, it could be viewed that way,” he said. “But I see it as a story about conformists following a con artist, and that’s a story that’s looming very large in this country right now.”