Can You Love the Art if You Can't Forgive the Artist?
Terry Curtis Fox Explores the Question in His New Play, Transgression
Veteran playwright Terry Curtis Fox has never been one to shy away from hard questions. With Transgression, now running at HERE Arts Center through August 2, he dives headfirst into one of the most contentious cultural debates of our time: Can you separate the art from the artist?
“Transgression is about the questions of whether you can separate the art from the artist and what you do with an artwork that is truly and personally harmful,” Fox explains. “As an artist, I want all art preserved. As a human being, a father, and a grandfather, I want no one hurt.”
The play is inspired by a real-life moral quandary: a summer barbecue in Brooklyn, a scandal involving a once-revered artist, and a now-infamous artifact.
“The Times had just done a story,” Fox recounts. “A lawyer said, ‘destroy the artifact.’ A biographer said, ‘You must preserve a primary source.’ The next day I was walking in Fort Greene Park and said to my wife, ‘I have to put everything else aside and write this play.’”
What followed was a deeply personal exploration of artistic legacy, moral responsibility, and familial reckoning—crafted by a man who’s been writing professionally since the age of 17.
“For my entire life, I have tried to write at least six days a week,” says Fox. “There is no physical act I love as much as I love writing (with the possible exception of sex). I get up every morning and long for the blank page.”
The play, while steeped in ethical complexity, finds moments of warmth, particularly in a mother-daughter scene that Fox calls his favorite. “It’s an interlude in a sea of sturm und drang,” he says.
That maternal theme finds real-life resonance in the production: Transgression is directed by Fox’s daughter, Avra Fox-Lerner. “We’ll do a scene in rehearsal and independently both want to cut the same lines,” he notes. “There’s both a shared aesthetic approach and massive mutual respect. But I also just get to look at her during the rehearsal process and think, ‘She is so damn good at this.’”
The cast includes Susan Bennett, Yuval Boim, Ivy Rose Cort, Jane Ives, and James Jelskin, and the show runs Thursdays through Sundays at HERE Arts Center, 145 Sixth Avenue.
For Fox, who decided at age three he belonged in the theater—after watching an actor run down the aisle at the 92nd Street Y—and who was irrevocably inspired by Mary Martin’s Peter Pan at the Winter Garden when he was six, Transgression is the continuation of a lifelong pursuit.
“I love plays about two rights,” he says. “It’s right to save a great work of art. It’s right to refuse to show a work that is actively doing harm.”
In a world increasingly forced to confront this paradox, Transgression doesn’t offer easy answers—but it dares to ask the right questions.
Follow @tcurtisfox on Instagram and Facebook, and @tcurtisfox@bkky.social
Tickets and info: HERE Arts Center
