The creative team of Laura Kepley, above, and Deborah Salem Smith have have put together the latest show at Trinity, a 90-minute play about censorship and art based on the photos of Sally Mann.

The Providence Journal / Sandor Bodo

Soon after the run of Boots on the Ground, Trinity Rep’s made-from-scratch docudrama about Rhode Islanders touched by the Iraq war, the creative team of Laura Kepley and Deborah Salem Smith took part in a workshop at the theater. They were interested in putting together a new piece about censorship and art, and they brought along some three dozen photos.

The actors assembled were asked to vote for the most beautiful image, and the most disturbing one. One photo, a shot of a naked girl with an adult male standing behind her, was voted both the most beautiful and most unsettling. This striking picture was by Sally Mann, the much lauded American photographer who has been accused by some of child pornography for taking nude shots of her young children.

Mann and her work seemed ripe with possibilities for a play about freedom of expression. What Smith and Kepley came up with is Some Things Are Private, which opens Friday in previews at Trinity.

One of the things that attracted Smith and Kepley to Mann’s work is its ambiguousness, something underscored by the reaction from those at the 2006 workshop. Half the room thought Mann’s photo was ravishing, half felt it shouldn’t be up on the wall. How could one image be so polarizing?

“We were interested in community values,” said Kepley, who is directing the play, “and art seemed to be a flashpoint for that. That was the driving force for that workshop, to see if we could get this acting company that had been together for so long to agree. And everybody in that room drew a line in different places.”

The thing about Mann’s photos, said Kepley, is that people see different things in them. Indeed, one person can see different things in the same image.

“It constantly flips,” said Kepley of the photo of the young girl and her adult companion. “You can see love and tenderness and you can see a threat. Then love and tenderness.

“There are no easy answers in art. It’s multiple readings.”

Audiences will get a chance to see for themselves. The 90-minute show uses a series of projections of Mann’s photos. It also uses Mann’s own words taken from books and articles. Mann, 56, has been consulted as the project has taken shape and has done some tweaking of the script. But she was not formally interviewed.

Like Boots, Some Things Are Private uses found material. But most of it has been gleaned from the Internet and local libraries, rather than one-on-one interviews. Boots used verbatim transcripts of two dozen Rhode Islanders who were in some way affected by the war, whereas this new show introduces fictional characters who are composites from both Mann’s critics and supporters.

“We knew we were interested in docudrama,” said Smith, who has taught writing at Rhode Island College, “but we knew we wanted to do things a little bit differently this time. So this has documentary elements to it, but it also kind of explodes and derails. Sally Mann is a central character, but she is also pitted against this fictional character, which is a really big difference.”

Kepley said the play is a lot like Mann’s photographs in that it blurs the lines between “documentation and invention.” Mann’s photos at once seem candid and posed.

“We said maybe that’s what our play should be like,” said Kepley, a resident director at Trinity. “We have historical records and facts, and then we have invention.”

The play has a cast of five. Trinity veteran Anne Scurria plays Mann and Stephen Thorne is the fictional Thomas Kramer, a lawyer and single dad who serves as narrator. The other three actors — Janice Duclos, Rachael Warren and Richard Donelly — conjure up different voices. In some cases they become the writers to the op-ed pages of The New York Times. Several letters to the editor about Mann’s work are quoted.

The show is in one act, with an audience talk-back afterwards. There was only so much material that could be squeezed into the play, said Kepley, so she and Smith are looking forward to other opinions.

Mann, who lives and works in Lexington, Va., where she grew up, first achieved prominence with a one-woman show at the Corcoran Gallery in Washington, D.C., in the late 1970s. But she is best known from pictures of her three children seen in the 1992 collection Immediate Family. In many of those images her children are naked, prompting some critics to call the work pornographic. If anything, that has helped her career. Mann continues to be collected by major museums and was named 2001 photographer of the year by Time Magazine.

More recently, she has trained her camera on lush landscapes of the rural South, using damaged lenses and cameras that create ghostly images that are full of light leaks.

Smith and Kepley said they decided to do a play about Mann and the issues surrounding her work after attending a show of family photos at New York’s Guggenheim Museum. Several photographers were represented, but viewers flocked to Mann’s pictures. Smith and Kepley said they were struck by a photo called The Perfect Tomato, which shows a table strewn with ripe tomatoes and Mann’s naked daughter standing next to them, on her tip toes with arms outstretched like a fairy taking flight. The image plays prominently in the show.

“Looking at this photo,” Kepley said the other day before rehearsal, “was kind of like time stopped. We were completely transported. We came home and knew we had to do a piece about Sally Mann.”

The two have been working on the project for about 18 months, digging up all they could on Mann, and boning up on the medium of photography. Smith did the writing, although director Kepley has helped with the editing, reading many an “atrocious” draft, said Smith.

The result was a script that raises a lot of issues, some quite relevant in this time when the right to privacy is pitted against national security.

“One of the interesting things that we found,” said Smith, “was that we don’t have a definition in America of what is private. We went to a constitutional lawyer and he said it’s not in the Constitution. It’s not a defined right, but an inferred one.”

Other issues that came up had to do with parental rights, and the appearance of exploitation. What happens, for example, when the parent giving consent for a photograph of their child to be put out in the world is the art maker?

And what constitutes pornography? Smith said that issue has come up with photo labs who find themselves developing snapshots of youngsters in the nude.

“When is there criminal intent,” asked Smith, “and when is it just play that 4-year-olds do in the bathtub and some one snaps a completely innocent picture? When is it appropriate for the government to step in?”

Photography interested Smith and Kepley because it tends to depicts real events, rather than, say, a painter’s impression of a scene or an abstract design.

“It begs a narrative,” said Kepley, “we feel we have to know what it going on behind it. So for that reason we knew photography was really important.”

But photos can just as easily be posed, an issue that comes up in photojournalism. The show looks at this question as well as the truth of images used in advertising.

But Smith and Kepley want people to know that Some Things Are Private is no dry, academic exercise.

“The goal was to explore these issues in a way that was really personal, theatrical, unexpected and fun,” said Kepley. “There’s just a real roller coaster ride that goes on, a real emotional ride.”

“It goes places that are unexpected,” said Smith. “The thing about Boots on the Ground was once you settled into it you knew where you were going. In this show, I’d be surprised if people know where they’re going.”

Some Things Are Private opens Friday and runs through March 23 at Trinity Rep, 201 Washington St., Providence. Tickets are $20-$60, with Friday’s preview a pay-what-you-can performance, with a limit of one ticket per customer. Tickets for that go on sale at 7 p.m. Call (401) 351-4242 or log onto www.trinityrep.com.

cgray@projo.com