Every Secret Thing

In this discomfiting study of McCarthyism, Richard Packard, a teacher, is contacted by an F B I agent and asked to spy on his colleagues. .. . Judy GeBauer’s haunting new Red Scare drama, EVERY SECRET THING … More than 50 years after McCarthy, EVERY SECRET THING ought to feel as incongruous and innocuous as a Twilight Zone episode. Seriously: The F B I muscles an eighth-grade civics teacher into spying on his fellow teachers? Ridiculous. Except it’s not. Instead, the play ripples through the years like a direct timeline to today … two aspects keep this old subject feeling disquietingly new. First: While most think McCarthyism targeted the Hollywood elite, EVERY SECRET THING shows just how insidiously it infiltrated suburban middle America. And second: As was the case then, and as is the case now, when adults speak, our children listen … It’s a disquieting and refreshingly civil look at a disease still infecting our country long aster we’ve thought it lulled into remission. -John Moore, Denver Post .. . EVERY SECRET THING by Judy GeBauer … begs to be absorbed by every human being from 7th grade on up. Astute 5th and 6th graders with civic minded parents could indeed wrap their minds around EVERY SECRET THING, speaking directly to a slice of history that dares not, for one second, be ignored. -Holly Bartges, Backstage