sExtOrtiOn by Patrick Thomas McCarthy

sExtOrtiOn, A lonely outcast hatches a scheme that draws his entire high school and its Middle American community into the harrowing world of teen sexting. Posing as a girl on a social media site, he entices his classmates to send him compromising photos and videos, then “sextorts” them into physical encounters with the threat of exposure.

Suggested by an actual teen “sexting” and extortion scandal, sExtOrtiOn digs beneath the superficial and sensationalistic treatments in national media accounts to explore the roots of adolescents’ fluid sexual identity, experimentation, and recklessness, plus the consequences of bullying, pack behavior, and hidden violence. sExtOrtiOn takes place over a year during which none of the “sextorted” boys reveals what is happening until the central character inexplicably turns himself in.

Over the course of the play’s 90 minutes, the nine characters of sExtOrtiOn struggle to make sense of the story’s myriad unanswered questions & to disguise what is actually happening.

IMAGE CREDITS – LUCAS CHILCZUK