Description

It’s Jo’s junior year of high school in LaGrange, Illinois, which can only be described as fml. She is busy fending off suburban boredom and navigating an ambiguous relationship with Emma, the new transfer student, when a new English teacher assigns Carson McCullers’ famed novel The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter to Jo’s English class. As she reads, Jo begins to feel akin to McCullers’ central character: forever the listener, definitively the outsider and perpetually misunderstood. Thanks in large part to the encouragement of her best friend, Mickey, Jo begins to turn her mindless doodles into an autobiographical graphic novel. But the confidence Jo has always had in her sexuality becomes shaken when she is the victim of a gay bashing. The event forces those close to Jo to question their own responsibility in the attack and find a voice of advocacy for those persecuted simply for being different. A story about isolation, fitting in and finding oneself, fml: how Carson McCullers saved my life is a play about surviving high school and how literature still has the power to transform the way we see the world. Area staging. Approximate running time: 90 minutes.