When Katherine Ann Power (played by Rebecca Gibel) first appears in a tan trench coat in Central Square Theater’s absorbing world premiere “The Getaway Driver,” she is a 21-year-old college student behind the wheel of a car in Boston, anxiously checking the time. Her friends and political comrades have just robbed a bank and she is the getaway driver. Then Power steps out of the car and removes her trench coat. It’s 23 years later, and now her name is Alice Metzinger. Alice is in Oregon, and she is about to tell a gathering of close friends that after years of living under an alias, she is on the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s Most Wanted List. Her real name is Katherine Power, and she is preparing to turn herself in.
For the next 90 minutes, we will learn about the United States in the late 1960s and early 1970s: the Vietnam War, the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy, and the 1970 attacks, some fatal, on student protesters at Kent State University, Jackson State University and the University of New Mexico. We will also learn about how Power went from being a “good girl” — a Denver high school valedictorian, deeply influenced by the social justice messages of her Catholic school nuns — to a radical Brandeis college student helping carry out armed robberies to raise money for radical causes.
We also learn about how these events affected Clare Schroeder (Rachael Warren), the eldest of the nine children of Patrolman Walter A. Schroeder, who was killed by one of Power’s accomplices during a bank robbery. Clare describes being pulled out of class and then collecting her younger siblings to learn their father had been shot and, the next day, that he had died. Power is enraged over the Vietnam War and racial injustice; Schroeder is enraged over the murder of her father. Though these women have never met, their lives are now inextricably knit together.
Power spends the next several years underground, working under fake Social Security numbers and moving on every few months. Eventually, Power builds a new life for herself in Oregon. She gives birth to a son, she finds a partner, and she develops her skills as a chef to run a successful restaurant. But the strain of concealment takes its toll, and in 1993, she travels back to Boston to turn herself in to the FBI.
A deal her attorneys negotiated for Power is altered (not in her favor) at the last minute by the judge. When she comes up for parole four and a half years later, the testimony of Clare Schroeder leads Power to make a shocking decision — one that changes both Power and Schroeder.
Inspired by the true-crime genre, “The Getaway Driver” is told mostly through a series of monologues in this two-woman show. It is not so much a “whodunit” as a “whydunit.” We know Power is complicit in the crimes; the structure of the play and the manner of its telling raise multiple questions: Does why she did what she did affect our views on the meaning of justice? Do those views change when we consider the lives of Katherine and Clare?
Performed with passion and conviction, “The Getaway Driver” is directed by Curt Columbus. A rolling world premiere, the play, written by Deborah Salem Smith and Charlie Thurston, opened at Trinity Repertory Company in Providence earlier this fall and will later head to Northern Stage in Vermont.
“The Getaway Driver” is at Central Square Theater through Nov. 22.
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