It is pretty much impossible to raise a boy these days.

No matter how hard you work, something always seems to fall through the cracks. Societal cycles, internet agitators, and education system collapse have combined to create the perfect breeding ground for an isolated, angry, and seemingly-unreachable generation. A perfectly sweet and decent child can soon be transformed into a bullishly stubborn and inconsiderate adolescent. Messages of misogyny, violence, and sectarian hatred flood spaces where teens gather, both online and in person. And when they bend to those echo chambers, they are written off as societal aberrations, "cancelled" with no hope of redemption, which only pushes them further toward darker groups along the fringes of society. Parents worry for their children. Children worry for their future. And trapped in the middle are millions of young men who feel cornered by choice and by circumstance. And, as we have seen time and again, the animal in us snaps when cornered for too long.

Punch, James Graham’s searing new play currently running on Broadway, has crossed the pond to encourage us to choose another way out. Together.

“I'll be honest, this story completely broke me,” Graham confesses from London, where he’s overseeing the production of the play in the West End, while producers oversee its simultaneous premiere on Broadway, now at the Samuel J. Friedman Theatre through November 2. “I grew up in the same kind of community that [Punch main character] Jacob grew up in, a post-industrial town in the north of England. I guess it's very similar to what you guys call 'The Forgotten,' the left-behind areas in the worst parts in America… God, I knew these guys.”

Chances are, you know them too. Punch is based on the best-selling memoir Right from Wrong by Jacob Dunne (played onstage by Will Harrison, in an impressive Broadway debut). Dunne as jailed after throwing a single punch in a street brawl, killing a man named James Hodgkinson. Born and raised in Meadows, Nottingham, in rough and rowdy public housing, Dunne was raised by a stretched-thin single mother who struggled to give him support when his teachers failed to give him what he needed to succeed as a person with dyslexia, ADHD, and autism. 

Instead, he was swept into a tight-knit group of friends who shared what little they had, scraping together pennies on the drug trade before going out in search of “drama” on raucous nights out, all the louder to block out the desperate cries that surrounded them. Dunne wasn’t involved when the fight with Hodgkinson began, but when he saw a friend in need, he swung, as was expected of him. After Hodgkinson’s death several days later, Dunne’s friend turned him in to the police, his mother was fired for raising a criminal, and he was jailed for manslaughter. In short, he was cornered. Then for 14 months, he was bombarded with one overwhelmingly loud message from almost every person he crossed paths with inside prison: vengeance was the only justice that he, a man, was allowed to hope for.

“I'm always slightly wary of saying that there is a masculinity crisis, because you're disparaging men by saying they're ‘in crisis’. But, obviously, it is quite a dangerous moment for vulnerable young men,” shares Graham. “The wrong lessons are being taught, and because of the nature of how young people's lives are lived online, they are being sent into these silos of toxicity where bad actors profit from teaching young men these horrible lessons on how to behave, preying on their vulnerability and sense of purposelessness, their sense of being lost. That sense of being lost is where a lot of this comes from, what a lot of young men feel these days. Jacob comes from a working class, underprivileged background, and he was an angry young white guy who, as a teenager, got involved in gangs and drugs and violence as a way of expressing himself in the absence of being taught any other way. And obviously, it led to this tragedy.”

Rather than processing the choices that had led to Hodgkinson’s death, or his culpability, Dunne was encouraged during his time in prison to focus specifically on revenging himself against the friend who had turned him in. Locked away with countless other young men who relied on violence to express the emotions they could not put into words, Dunne was groomed to continue the cycle of rage and recidivism.

But then, letters from Hodgkinson’s parents began arriving.

Says Graham: “This is a story about loss and grief and the criminal justice system, which is not fit for purpose, and broken as much in the U.K. as it is in the US. It's an extraordinary story of hope and the power of forgiveness. I think most stories set in the world of crime and toxic masculinity and violence, they're not always full of hope and optimism and humanity. But this story just has that in spades, thanks to Joan.”

Joan, Hodgkinson’s mother (who is played in Punch by two-time Tony winner Victoria Clark), sent Dunne letters after his release through a restorative justice program that sought to help both sides heal from the incident. It's a stark contrast to the punitive justice system most often employed on both sides of the pond. Restorative justice seeks understanding and clarity for all involved, in order to move forward. Punitive justice exists to punish the perpetrator, rather than to rehabilitate them.

“I live in absolute bewilderment and wonder,” Graham states, briefly at a loss for words when considering the enormity of courage it took for Hodgkinson’s parents to reach out to Dunne. “The generosity and scale of what Joan was able to do in her grief by reaching out to the person who killed her son... Well, it took me more than two hours to put it into words.”

After years of being written off by almost every adult in his orbit, Joan reached out with a question that likely saved Dunne’s life: “What are you going to do now? With your life? What do you want to do?”

That she cared whether he lived or died, after what he had done to her son, floored Dunne, ripping his mind out of the cycle of vengeance to eventually become the man he is today: a renowned public speaker and authoritative voice on the power of restorative justice, with a degree in criminology and a focus on saving as many young men as he can.

Graham’s voice is reverent as he describes the work Dunne has dedicated his second chance at life to. “Following the journey of this play, his whole thing has been going around to vulnerable men, whether in prisons, in schools, or in deprived communities, and trying to educate and encourage them to make better choices. He gives them an emotional toolkit, that is not always provided to young men in the culture that we have at the moment, so that when you're stressed, when you're scared, when you're anxious, that you don't automatically default to physical violence as your response mechanism. He gives them the capacity and the training and the emotional intelligence to choose a different path, which will be a healthier one in those stressful situations.”

While Dunne was convicted in 2011, things have only gotten worse in the 14 years that have passed since his sentence. As we witness higher and higher rates of extreme violence from younger and younger men, it can no longer be denied that there is an urgent, terrifyingly deep wave of anti-social violence being spoon-fed to boys from an early age.

“It's a nightmare,” Graham states bluntly. “There are equal societal and cultural pressures on young women and girls, but those pressures encourage them to direct their fury inward. For boys, it’s all external, and they can’t win, no matter what they do. You’re either mocked for being weak, told you’re not a man for walking away, or you’re labelled toxic for standing your ground. They don’t know what they’re supposed to do. And then these really toxic voices come along and get into their heads, going ‘there's nothing wrong with you. Be the most egregious version of masculinity you can be. Revel in it.’ And for many of them, that is a seductive argument that we have to override.”

Graham continues, energized by the opportunity to speak openly about a crisis so many of us have disconnected from. “What is a good man? What is a strong man? What is a successful man? These are questions we have to answer for these boys. Because if we don't, terrible people will do it for us. We have to teach young men that when things go wrong, and they are going to go wrong, and when you don't get what you want (and you might not always deserve to get what you want), or when you fail and it hurts—you can either default to a really negative and dark version of yourself that is angry and that wants vengeance and that wants to punish other people because you feel like you've been punished. Or you can choose to heal. 

"And that’s a much harder journey to go on, but a much more rewarding and valuable one, if the lessons that you've learned are self reflection and growth, trying to understand what happened and to learn from that so that you can become stronger next time. Across cultures, across political spectrums, we should all be looking to understand the power of resilience in our young men, rather than allowing them to default into the Andrew Tate School of resentment and anger.”

A part of reversing this terrifying trend is offering forgiveness to those who have been perpetrators, and offering them a way back to decency: If someone truly learns from their behavior and atones, they should be given a second chance, just as Dunne was given a second chance. Unfortunately, forgiveness is a hard pill to swallow for many.

“Right-wing factions have this narrative that they trot out, which is that ‘you have to be strong on crime’, and being strong on crime means that you have hard punishments,” Graham explains. “And look, I am not against punishment. I think there is a moral imperative in society that, if you do something wrong, then there has to be some sort of consequence. That's almost a natural law. But there's a completely mad irrationality to our criminal justice system today, that decided only to prioritize punishment, and to spend huge sums of money locking people away into an environment that actively makes them worse human beings, rather than helping them to advance and learn and grow as people. That is not what a moral and rational society should think is the way forward.”

That approach to justice wholly ignores the reality that growth and change is possible. It paints criminals as inherently evil figures to be societally abandoned, with no thought as to what the rest of their lives can look like. “Forgiveness is just not valued as an attribute in our cultures at the moment, in the U.K. or in the U.S. You have a president, whether you support him or not, who's defined by ‘being strong’, and that strength is defined by being mean and being aggressive and being tough and competitive. Punch as a play advocates for the idea that there is a more positive kind of masculinity that says nobody benefits from the spiral of violence, and that there are people like Jacob who can show young men the way to a better future.”

Punch first premiered in Dunne’s native Nottingham at the Nottingham Playhouse, where it soon sold out. Families brought their teens, combining a night out on the town with a desperately needed forum to have the conversations many parents can’t quite put into words on their own.

And Dunne himself is a big supporter of the play, says Graham: “Jacob, with his own bare hands, built what he called a Talking Circle of Seats, which was positioned outside the theatre in Nottingham on the terrace so that people could sit and talk to one another after the show. At every venue, we organized events with speakers, social services, charity workers, judges, anyone we can to engage with members of the public as they reflect on the themes of the show together." 

Marvels Graham: "The one thing I come back to, every time, is how Jacob was so lucky that the people he harmed were David and Joan, who had this almost super-human capacity to see him as a human being, an extraordinary act that I think probably did come close to saving his life. And we're lucky that Jacob had it within him, despite his upbringing, to find this extraordinary capacity to change and to rewire his thinking, in order to radically alter his life. They’re the kind of example we all need if we’re going to survive this moment in history together.”