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This Flat Earth Review: Another School Shooting, and Two Teens Reel

April 9, 2018 Leave a comment

In “This Flat Earth,” 13-year-old Julie (Ella Kennedy Davis) doesn’t understand why the newspaper article about the school shooting that killed nine of her classmates has the word “Another” in the headline.

“Has this happened before?”

Her father Dan (Lucas Papaelias) reluctantly informs her that it has.

“If this has happened before, why would everybody be acting so shocked?…Why don’t the grown-ups just fix it?”
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Filed under New York Theater, Off-Broadway, Theater Reviews, violence on stage

Mass Shootings on Stage: Healing or Titillating?

February 15, 2018 1 Comment

The mass shooting on Valentine’s Day at a Florida high school is the latest in a long line of school shootings, some of which are instantly identifiable: Columbine, Virginia Tech, Sandy Hook.

Each of these has been the subject of plays, as have some of the other most notorious mass shootings in the United States.

Noah Robbins as the bullied Chadwick with Will Pullen in Simon Stephens’ Punk Rock, MCC Theater, 2014
Mother Emanuel

Other dramas about shooters or shootings don’t dramatize specific events, but take their inspiration from what one can call, horribly, the trend.

Below are some examples — the good, the bad and the ugly — and they pose a question. As I put it in the title of a piece I wrote for HowlRound in 2015:  Violence on Stage: Healing or Titillating?   Enlightening…or exploitative?

 

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Filed under arts issues, history, New York Theater, violence on stage