Director David Miller had invited playwright Jacques Lamarre and three actors cast in the play, one of whom plaid the lead in Vicuna. The audience was about 2t, including several FOSEL board members who had helped set up the refreshment table. The Zeitgeist group sat in a semi-circle facing the audience.
Miller explained that the play grew out of a Boston Foundation announcement that they wanted to award grants to the theatre community for new work so he met with playwright Lamarre in Provincetown to discuss some possibilities for a new play. Lamarre had just finished reading the memoir by the mother of Dylan Klebold, A Mother’s Reckoning,” about the teenager who killed many of his classmates and then himself, two decades ago this April at the Columbine High School in Columbine, CO.
Lamarre decribed Suzanne Klebold’s book as cathartic for him and, since his most popular work was based on adaptations, decided he wanted to adapt the Klebold memoir. He got in touch with the author who declined to give her permission. She declined.
A a resident of Hartford, CT, the locust of Colt fire arms which created the Gilded Age for Hartford when producing weapons for the Civil War and, later, mass-producing guns against he country itself, Lamarre is passionate about gun control. Many people left Hartford over the problems caused by gun violence. Numerous subsequent shootings, in CT and elsewhere around the nation, helped him decide that he wanted to tell the story of how and why this peculiarly American problem kept happening, and why the shooters are not caught sooner.
This was the genesis of Trigger Warning. Zeitgeist did not get its grant from the Boston Foundation. But the play will open on April 12 at the BCA, centered on the aftermath of a shooting from the perspective of the shooter.
To demonstrate how a play goes from Page to Stage, the three actors read from two scenes, the first one interspersed by an extensive discussion about the role of guns in the American family and its consequences.
In the first scene, the parents of the shooter, Travis, who has killed a number of people, injured his 16-year-old sister and killed himself, are alone at the home where the shooting took place a few weeks earlier. They had to leave it for a while since it was a ‘crime scene.’ The father, a contractor, was a gun owner whose guns, though locked away, had been used to commit the crime. The daughter had left her parents’ house in the fictional town of Plainsville to live with her aunt.
The parents bantered back-and-forth in a manner that at some level felt surprisingly normal, the way any couple will go back and forth, but with comments and questions that alluded to the devastating turn their lives had taken and to their having entered the unknown territory of being shunned by their community. “What’s going to happen to us” and “I lost two clients today” and “should we sell the house?” and “did you live Travis?” and the answer, “yes, but I wish he’d never been born.”
In the discussion, playwright Lamarre talked about the victims of shootings ho were not acknowledged even though their lives have been destroyed by the shooter. The mother of Dylan Klebold, for example, went from a well-respected member of the community to someone who had to go into hiding to mourn the loss of a child because the community she lived in was mourning the loss of its children killed by her son. They became families at ear with themselves: What could they have done differently? The real mother of the shooter of the Sandy Hook school in Newtown had lived in fear of her son. The fictional parents of Travis had taken him from therapist to therapist, without finding something that helped their son. No one had an answer.
Director Miller said that two ideas emerged from his initial discussions with Lamarre: First, that Zeitgeist Stage always produced plays that reflect “the spirit of the times” so school shootings was a relevant subject. There had been documentaries, and plays about the shooting, but never a play from the perspective of the shooter. The second idea was that the initial title, Thoughts and Prayers,” usually offered by those commenting on mass hootings, was too passive. Trigger Warning is both a general warning for lectures or events that may trigger trauma, but in this case, the word “trigger” had an appropriate duality. Thus the title.
After completion of the first draft, auditions and cast selection, the cast held a read-through in December with Lamarre, followed by an in-depth discussion. The playwright holed up in a cabin in the woods, and two weeks later, he returned with a revised draft. “It evolved organically,” he said. “You never see the shooter.” But he had added several characters who each represented another aspect of the story: A minister, who asked her not to come to church anymore and upset the other parishioners; and a lawyer, to fend off the lawsuits by enraged parents. The Klebolds were bankrupted by it, as was their insurance company. “But,” said Lamarre, “when you have a loss, you want it acknowledged.” In the play, scenes evolved about the mother talking to the minister and the father to the lawyer, each describing from different points of view being cast from the community they were a part of. The daughter, living with the mother’s sister, attends a “Never Again” rally in town a week or two later, speaking against the parents, multiplying the arguments for a law suit against them.
Lamarre said he wanted to capture the depth of the rejection by the community of the parents of the hooter: How can you go on when no one is on your side? No spiritual comfort or legal protection. And with the relentless media coverage, the violence turned into entertainment. The playwright noted that in Columbine, fourteen trees were planted to memorialize all the killed students, including the shooters, those trees were cut down. The mother of Dylan Klebold, after watching the videos that captured the assault by her son, had to acknowledge he son had become “a monster.”
Zeitgeist Stage had once before staged a play about a school shooting, called Punk Rock. They were in rehearsal for it during the Marathon Bombings. When it was performed, three weeks later, there were discussions after the performance because people felt they wanted and needed to talk about it.
Several audience members brought up a 1,000-page book “Far From the Tree’ about parents who find themselves in a situation through their children that is not the norm, whether dwarfism or mental-health issues or, in this case, mass shootings. No parent wants to be seen as a afailure, but hat to do, or hat ha been the experience of parents, for whom that became a reality.
The Newtown shooter’s mother was a “responsible” gun owner with a seriously challenged child. She lived in a gun culture with a son who should not have access to guns, but did.
