From that broad idea they soon narrowed their focus to the issue of free speech, then homed in even more closely on Mann's often controversial photographs, many of which show her children in the nude. The images are disquieting, haunting, eerily beautiful evocations of the profound and mundane mysteriousness of family life - in my opinion; in others', they're kiddie porn. Clearly, there's rich stuff here for drama.
Smith, who wrote "Some Things Are Private," and Kepley, who directed it, make the most of this polarizing material. Like "Boots," "Some Things Are Private" draws on interviews, articles, and other documentary artifacts, but it goes further than the earlier work in fictionalizing from its sources - so far, in fact, that Smith and Kepley subtitle it "a surreal docu-drama."
Rather than leading to a queasy blurring of reality and fiction, however, the carefully crafted result provokes us to consider how often any art performs this kind of alchemy: to take the reality of the artist's world, then frame it, distill it, compose it into something that both is and isn't "real." In the play (as she did in the public record, from which almost all her lines here are drawn), Mann calls this seeing through her "photo eyes" - looking at what's right in front of her, but looking at it specifically as an artist.
As she points out, all her images of her children, naked and not, are the kind of things any mother sees all the time. But that hasn't stopped a host of critics from attacking her for exploiting her children, violating their innocence, or pandering - wittingly or not - to pedophiles. (One of the most shocking ironies in the play concerns an infamous critique in "a national US newspaper" whose name is bleeped whenever the actors try to speak it, because the newspaper's owners refused permission to use the name onstage; a cursory online search reveals it's The Wall Street Journal, which should be ashamed.)
