Review: BAD BOOKS at Round House Theatre

The American Library Association (ALA) has just posted its latest list of books that have been "challenged"; Round House Theatre's trenchant production of Sharyn Rothstein's Bad Books "celebrates" Library Week by revealing how censorship can negatively spiral and fake free speech has consequences.

A mother walks into a library to confront a librarian who recommended to her 15 year old son a book that the mother does not approve of. The mother hasn't read it; but she "posts" to her online social media her negative opinion of the book and the librarian (i.e. fake free speech; she, in fact, slanders the librarian--behavior so fashionable these days from the White House to the rest of the planet). The librarian's sensible arguments about the purpose of books, libraries, librarians, and, indeed, of facts fall on proverbially deaf ears. To further outline what happens in Bad Books would be to trade in spoilers. But audience members who care about the future and freedom of facts and ideas in the USA are guaranteed a thought-provoking and moving 90 minutes of theatre.

Holly Twyford's splendid portrayal of The Mother generously spares no emotion. Whether misplaced, smug anger or shattered grief, Twyford delivers a dimensional portrait of this woman. Rothstein wisely never villainizes her, and the fact that The Mother is never caricatured makes both the play and Twyford's outstanding work the more poignant. Kate Eastwood Norris creates THREE portraits (and a class for aspiring actors on the importance to the process of thought script). First, she's the confrontational but wise librarian who has never met a four-letter word she didn't relish using, but who expresses with easy clarity the reasons libraries remain such fundamentally important institutions for society. Next, she's an HR manager who has definitely attended one too many professional development sessions on how to "manage." Her character provides comic relief for the audience, but the opposite for The Mother. Finally, Eastwood Norris portrays the mom of one of The Mother's son's friends. A personally gentle soul, she's also a professional editor who, thus, contributes one more angle on the business of books for The Mother and the play.

Meghan Raham's excellent set design mixes conventional "it looks like a librarian's desk and book cart" with abstract arrangements above and below the stage of hundreds of banned books--lit by Colin K. Bills to complement Raham's ideas that the banned books deserve a look of their own. Their mixture satisfies the expectation that a library ought to look like a library while visually implying that books look one way but actually are another (bigger on the inside, if you know what I'm talking about). What does not come clear is Director Ryan Rilette's purpose in placing the action of the play on a turntable that rotates for 90 minutes. The distraction of watching the actors actually going around in circles undermines the realism of their acting and the forthrightness of Rothstein's playwrighting.

Without ever preaching or teaching, Rothstein's fine play constitutes a wake-up call for those on the verge of being condemned to repeat history and a cheer-up call for those who already live by Thomas Carlyle's notion that a true university is a collection of books. To find the ALA's latest list of "bad" books, grab your pearls and visit https://www.ala.org/news/2025/04/american-library-association-kicks-national-library-week-top-10-most-challenged-books.

Bad Books runs through May 4.