A MESSAGE FROM THE ARTISTIC DIRECTOR

Dear Friends,

How did she do it? Susie Hinton was 16 years old when she wrote The Outsiders. It boggles the mind. When I think of myself at age 16, it is purely impossible to imagine myself having the discipline or the vision to imagine this kind of startling, complicated and indelible story of the Greasers and Socs. And yet, maybe this novel’s seismic impact across several generations of readers is exactly because Susie wrote it at sixteen, when the fears, aspirations and alienation of her characters were inextricably linked to her own immediate life experience. Those same things were front and center in my own life when I first read the book in seventh grade English.

But re-approaching this story at this stage of my adulthood, I also know that the core themes of The Outsiders never stop being relevant. For almost all of us, there is no time in our lives where we don’t feel different or excluded in some form, even as we still hunger for connection and community. Human beings are so instinctively and depressingly good at dividing ourselves up from each other, and how we define our “us” against their “them” often leads to unnecessary violence.

The creative team charged with re-creating this story for our moment is a perfect match for the material. There’s the poetic muscularity of Adam Rapp’s book; the music – from Jonathan Clay, Zach Chance and Justin Levine – that feels completely contemporary while still evoking the sweat, dust, dirt and blood of 1967 Tulsa; the Kuperman brothers’ choreography, which fluidly melds the tender and the terrifying. And at the helm, the dynamic, compassionate vision of director Danya Taymor.

That The Outsiders still grabs us so tightly more than half a century after its publication is a testament to this story, its characters, Susie Hinton, and our enduring human need to belong.

Christopher Ashley

DIRECTOR