When Outrage Becomes Toxic: “The Getaway Driver” at Trinity Rep

Trinity Rep’s remarkable new true-crime drama asks difficult questions about political violence, responsibility, remorse and whether redemption is ever really possible.

I went to see The Getaway Driver at Trinity Rep expecting an interesting true story and a good night of theater.

I got considerably more than that.

Written by Deborah Salem Smith and Charlie Thurston and directed by Curt Columbus, The Getaway Driver is a world-premiere drama inspired by the intertwined stories of Katherine Ann Power and Clare Schroeder. Rebecca Gibel plays Power. Rachael Warren plays Schroeder.

Both performances are excellent.

The Providence production runs at Trinity Rep through October 4 before continuing its rolling world premiere at Central Square Theater in Cambridge and Northern Stage in Vermont.

The underlying story is extraordinary.

In 1970, Katherine Ann Power was a 21-year-old Brandeis University student and antiwar activist. She became involved with a group that broke into a National Guard armory in Newburyport, Massachusetts, stealing ammunition and other government property. Three days later, she participated in a Boston bank robbery. Power drove one of the getaway cars. Boston police officer Walter Schroeder responded to the robbery and was shot and killed.

Power disappeared and remained a fugitive for 23 years before voluntarily surrendering in 1993.

A Period I Remember

Part of what made the play particularly affecting for me is that the political world it depicts is not ancient history.

I lived through it. Yes, I'm that old.

The late 1960s and 1970s were a time of enormous political upheaval. Opposition to the Vietnam War, the civil rights struggle and distrust of government existed alongside organizations and individuals who concluded that political conviction justified violence.

The Weather Underground, the Black Liberation Army, the Symbionese Liberation Army and others became part of the landscape. Bombings, robberies and political violence were things we heard about with unsettling regularity.

And for me, that history eventually came quite close to home.

In 1983, I was attending Hofstra University Law School. On May 12 of that year, the United Freedom Front bombed the Theodore Roosevelt Jr. Army Reserve Center in nearby Uniondale. I lived only a few hundred yards away, and my girlfriend at the time lived in dormitories immediately adjacent to the facility. A warning was called in shortly before the explosion. Fortunately, no one was injured.

Later that year, the UFF struck again nearby, detonating two bombs in a building housing a Navy recruiting office in East Meadow. Again, a warning was given and the building was evacuated before the explosions. No one was injured. My girlfriend and I had applied to the Navy JAG Corps through that recruiting office.

So when The Getaway Driver explores the point at which political outrage crosses into political violence, I don't experience the subject entirely as history.

I remember what that world felt like.

“Toxic Outrage”

At one point, Power uses a particularly perceptive phrase: “toxic outrage.”

It may be the phrase from the play that stayed with me most.

Outrage does not necessarily begin in the wrong place. People see injustice. They become angry. They believe institutions are failing or that government policies are causing terrible harm.

But outrage can become intoxicating and ultimately toxic.

Eventually, the righteousness of the cause can begin to justify the means used to advance it.

That is one of the most interesting things The Getaway Driver does with Katherine Power.

Initially, she is an easy person to understand. She is young, intelligent and horrified by what she sees happening around her. The play gives us enough context to understand the forces that drew some people from protest into increasingly radical circles.

But Power was not merely a college student who attended demonstrations and found herself accidentally standing next to the wrong people.

She became an active participant in serious criminal conduct.

That distinction matters.

Understanding why someone becomes radicalized is not the same thing as excusing what that person does after becoming radicalized.

The play understands that.

A Story That Refuses to Stay One-Sided

What makes The Getaway Driver especially effective is that it does not allow Katherine Power's story to stand alone.

The consequences of the violence surrounding her are always there.

Walter Schroeder was not an abstraction. He was a police officer, a husband and the father of nine children. His death cannot be reduced to a plot point in someone else's story of political awakening or personal redemption.

That presence changes the moral weight of the play.

It also keeps the production from becoming a simple exercise in either condemnation or rehabilitation.

The audience is asked to hold more than one truth at once.

Power can be intelligent, sympathetic and remorseful.

She can also be responsible for terrible decisions.

The Schroeder family can insist that the cost of those decisions never be forgotten.

None of those truths cancels out the others.

Explanation or Justification?

Power's later explanations for what she did are another source of tension.

There are moments when she seems genuinely insightful about the forces that led her to radicalism. There are other moments when explanation begins to sound uncomfortably close to self-justification.

That line is difficult to locate.

A person can sincerely regret what she has done while still wanting people to understand why she did it. Remorse does not require pretending that history, personality, relationships and circumstances played no role.

But there is a point at which “this is how I got there” can begin to sound like “this is why I should not be fully blamed.”

The Getaway Driver is strongest when it refuses to make that question easy.

Remorse Measured by Cost

The historical record tells us that Power eventually surrendered after 23 years as a fugitive.

By then she had built an entirely different life in Oregon. She had married, had a son, worked as a teacher and chef, and helped build a life far removed from the person authorities had been searching for.

And she gave that life up to face the consequences of what she had done.

That fact is difficult to ignore.

It is easy to say you are sorry when saying it costs nothing.

Power's remorse cost her her freedom. She pleaded guilty and received an eight-to-twelve-year state prison sentence, along with a concurrent federal sentence arising from the armory theft.

Her later choices raise an even more difficult question: whether remorse should be measured primarily by words or by what a person is willing to sacrifice.

The play does not answer that question for us.

It simply makes it impossible not to ask.

No Easy Verdict

Perhaps that is why The Getaway Driver works as well as it does.

It doesn't require us to decide that Katherine Power was either a misunderstood idealist or an irredeemable criminal.

She could have been idealistic and dangerously naïve.

She could have believed deeply in the injustice she was opposing and still have been responsible for terrible decisions.

She could sometimes rationalize her conduct and nevertheless be genuinely remorseful.

And Walter Schroeder could remain an innocent man whose death cannot be balanced away by anything Power subsequently did.

Those ideas are not mutually exclusive.

Rebecca Gibel and Rachael Warren make that complexity believable. Neither woman becomes merely a device in the other's story.

The result is an unusually thoughtful piece of theater.

I went in expecting a true-crime drama.

I left thinking about something much larger: how legitimate outrage becomes toxic, how people convince themselves that a righteous objective permits increasingly indefensible conduct, how difficult genuine accountability is, and whether a human being should forever be defined by the worst thing she ever participated in.

Those aren't questions The Getaway Driver answers.

Its achievement is that, by the time the lights come up, they are much harder questions than they were when the play began.

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RI Recommends: The Getaway Driver
Trinity Repertory Company, Providence
Through October 4, 2026