I was a Teenaged Fabulist: The <i>dark play</i> of Adolescent Sexuality in U.S. Drama
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The breakout hit of the 2007 Humana Festival, Carlos Murillo's dark play or stories for boys received wide notice for its provocative theatricalization of the “true” story of “one teenager's near-fatal internet attraction.” In subsequent professional productions in major U.S. cities including Los Angeles, Atlanta, Philadelphia, and Salt Lake City (as well as scores of university productions nationwide), Murillo's dark play has been routinely promoted as a tale of contemporary teen life, depicting dangers and deceptions peculiar to the Internet age. In this article, I argue that the significance of Murillo's dark play derives less from its contemporaneity than from its clarifying evocation of the longer history of staging sexually precocious adolescent characters within U.S. middlebrow drama since the early decades of the twentieth century. As I trace how such intimate dramas of gossip, rumour, and innuendo evoke the “dangerous games” played by adolescent characters in mid-century works by Lillian Hellman, Arthur Miller, and Robert Anderson, this article explicates how the “teen fabulist,” the kid who makes stuff up about herself or himself and others, emerges as a privileged device through which U.S. dramatists have sought to stage otherwise unstageable uncertainties about morality, hypocrisy and societal norms configuring “truth.”
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.008 | 0.007 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".