In ‘The Getaway Driver,’ Trinity Rep Tackles True Crime During the Vietnam Era

Rebecca Gibel as Katherine (left) and Rachael Warren as Clare (right) in Trinity Rep’s The Getaway Driver. (Photo by Mark Turek)

On the morning of Sept. 23, 1970, a gunman in Boston fired a shot that would change the lives of two women, and their families, forever.

So begins The Getaway Driver, a new play by Deborah Salem Smith and Charlie Thurston that premiered this week at Trinity Repertory Company. The show is part of a three-part rolling premiere that includes productions at Central Square Theater in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in November and Northern Stage in White River Junction, Vermont, in February.

The true crime drama tells the story of two women connected forever by an avoidable tragedy. In 1970, Katherine Ann Power was a college student swept up in the storm of anti-Vietnam War protests. On Sept. 23, she and four accomplices robbed a bank with the intent to fund a revolution. During the course of the robbery, one of the members shot Boston police officer Walter Schroeder, who later died of his injuries. Power — the getaway driver — went on the run. As other members of the group faced justice for the crime, she kept running, eventually becoming the longest-running woman on the FBI’s Most Wanted List.

Power’s story has been told in various articles and books. But the play brings into focus another voice, one that has stayed largely — and, to some extent, purposefully — out of the spotlight over the years: Walter Schroeder’s teenage daughter Clare, who became an impromptu spokesperson for the family in the days following the attack. The play explores how Schroeder has grappled with her father’s death and the people responsible for it even as Power’s narrative heads toward redemption for her role in his murder.

Smith and Thurston are no strangers to bringing real-life drama to the Trinity Rep stage. Last year, they explored the lasting impacts of the Iraq War on Rhode Islanders in Someone Will Remember Us — a topic Smith had first covered twenty years earlier with Boots on the Ground. Smith, Trinity Rep’s playwright-in-residence, and Thurston, a resident member of the company, are known for their ability to translate real-world events to the stage. But this is the first time, they say, either of them has tackled the true crime genre.

“There’s not a lot of true crime in theater in general,” Smith says, adding that the genre is more popular in podcasts and TV.

In most true crime content, the tension is drawn from wondering who the killer is and whether they’ll be caught. In The Getaway Driver, the audience learns the major details of the story early on. The tension here comes instead from examining the cultural forces that led to the events and how the characters come to terms with the outcome. Early drafts — they’ve been working on the play since 2018 — included as many as fifteen characters to explain the tensions of the Vietnam era, Smith says. In recent years, they pared the cast down to two as its themes became once again familiar to the modern viewer.

“Revising this play, we realized we didn’t need to explain the political violence of the sixties and seventies because we’re living in a moment where political figures have been attacked and killed,” she says. “We are living through a moment right now where people are in echo chambers of their own rage.”

They also tweaked the script in response to feedback from the play’s two subjects. While the initial script was based purely off the public record — incorporating news reports and legal transcripts, among other sources — Smith and Thurston reached out to their subjects via letters and spoke with them both before moving onto final drafts. It was a nerve-wracking moment, Thurston recalls, as the writers hadn’t spoken with the women before beginning the project and were unsure what kind of response they would receive.

“Luckily, they were both incredibly kind and generous and believed in their theatergoers. They believe the theater’s a great medium for storytelling and for telling big stories, and they gave us their blessing,” he says.

The play is directed by outgoing Trinity Rep Artistic Director Curt Columbus. Meredith McDonough began her appointment as the new artistic director in August. For cast, the play features longtime Trinity Rep company members Rebecca Gibel and Rachael Warren in the respective roles as Power and Schroeder. The production takes place in the Dowling Theater. (The larger Chace Theater remains under renovation.)

Smith and Thurston say they hope audiences come away from the show with a better appreciation for the questions behind the actions of its characters, and an understanding of both women’s perspectives, whatever conclusions an audience member may draw.

“There’s a lot of gray. Two simultaneous contradictory things can exist at the same time,” Thurston says. “We’re not interested in writing a play that tells you exactly what you should think at the end.”

“What theater just does so well is let you do a deep dive into the human being’s experience. The very specific, lovely, messy, human being’s experience,” Smith adds.

The Getaway Driver plays at Trinity Repertory Company through Oct. 4. Visit trinityrep.com for more information and tickets.

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