The
folks at the United States Theatre Project -- writers
Stephen Karam, Sean McNall, and PJ Paparelli and dramaturg
Patricia Hersch -- have been corroborating materials
collected from interviews, eye-witness reports, survivor
testimony,
and other research based on the 1999 Columbine High
School tragedy for a dramatic transformation that is
every bit
as intense as the story it explores.
The
result is columbinus, a rumbling production
and emotional heavyweight that
drops small, sad bombs on the heart. You
want to intervene, but you are only a spectator witnessing
the tragic story of two seemingly typical American high
school misfits whose ignored angst led to inconceivable
acts of violence toward their fellow classmates and ultimately,
themselves. "From a fictional high school in suburban
America to Littleton, Colorado," columbinus details
the shocking and uncomfortable chain of events of April
20, 1999, when fifteen lives were taken by two teenagers
spinning desperately out of control.
Eric
Harris and Dylan Klebold, the duo that opened fire on
their school
library, are brought to terrifying life
through off-the-charts performances from Karl Miller
and Will Rogers. Miller’s enormous instincts
fuel his massive boulder of a role, while Rogers’ strength
manifests in a realistic portrayal of a sad loner longing
to connect with his peers. The physical resemblances,
as evident by two yearbook photos of the real Harris
and Klebold,
is at once unsettling, while the remaining cast of
eight delivers authentic, powerful interpretations
of high
school personas, from Daniel Frith’s closeted "party
guy " to Gene Gillette’s smug jock.
columbinus,
the Latin phrase for "dove-like" or "peace-like," closely
examines the rampant stereotypes and personal identities
that form in American high school society, where
hormones rage and teenagers, as miniature adults
without the experience,
are bred among a national culture of apathy and
ignorance. The authors do not assert reasons why
the events
that took place in Colorado were inevitable, but
rather how they
were inevitable. Director Paparelli, who makes
consistently excellent choices in staging and music,
avoids the
didactic road of blame and ultimate responsibility.
His drama never
attempts to excuse the actions of the guilty, but
instead offers glimpses into their disconnected
realities.
While
columbinus is proof that some of the best true stories
make the best staged dramas,
its choking
narrative and
riveting performances leave the audience grappling
with exhausting questions of liability and ethics,
fate and
destiny. Though the story demonstrates teen angst
at its most extreme, parents and teachers and
friends continue to ignore warning signs of aggression
and
intolerance.
Told through an artistic medium, columbinus is
a tasteful,
accurate, and effective review of life in the
locker
rooms,
cafeterias, and courtyards across America. Its
most troubling question still remains: How many
isolated
and lonely
Dylans and Erics are out there, struggling right
now?
Washington
City Paper: (excerpts)
..The
two leads are breathtakingly in sync, each
feeding the other's fury in delicately shaded
ways...
|
Everyone
will have his own moment of recognition at the Round
House Theater's alternately
electrifying and
fiercely mundane evocation of the 1999 bloodbath at Columbine
High School. The show is all about how the casual brutality
of adolescence contributes to tragedy, and the first
half of the show effectively implicates everyone in the
audience
by demonstrating that fear and pressure can dog not just
the punks, goths, and dweebs among us, but also the jocks,
nice girls, and BMOC-types who appear to have it all
together. Act 2 gives two of Act 1's anonymous kids names--Klebold
and Harris--and things become horrifyingly specific.
If
the first act's generalized high-school mayhem has
the easy grace of choreography, the savage give-and-take
in the second feels as precisely calibrated as a stroll
on
a tightrope. The two leads are breathtakingly in sync,
each feeding the other's fury in delicately shaded
ways.
Dan Covey's hard-edged lighting paints them and their
classmates into corners, and Martin Desjardins' sound
design, after
setting moods with pop songs, finds an efficiently
horrifying way to evoke gunfire. Other design elements
and the ensemble's
harrowing performances combine to the evening's penultimate
moments shatteringly effective...
Washington
Post:
"Round House's 'columbinus' Limns The Darkest
Corners of Adolescence"
By
Peter Marks
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, March 9, 2005; Page C01
...the
production, directed with a surefire sense
of theatricality by PJ Paparelli and performed
by a flawless cast of eight, offers invaluable
insight into the primitive psychological
warfare that goes on in high school hallways
and cafeterias...
...the
play is a plea for illuminating the corrosive
secrets young people harbor, secrets that
should not have led two mixed-up boys and
more than a dozen others to early graves.
|
At
the unsettling heart of columbinus, Round
House Theatre's ambitious examination of the 1999
bloodbath at Columbine High School, are two harrowing
performances.
Karl Miller and Will Rogers portray Eric Harris
and Dylan Klebold, the deluded boys who systematically
massacred 12 of their classmates and a teacher. And
they
are
simply
riveting.
Let
us leave aside for a moment the thorny question of taste,
whether there is anything indecent
in a
meticulous regurgitation of the repulsive thoughts
and acts of
the
two young men who died with their victims on that
awful day in Colorado. What Miller and Rogers do
in this
startling, emotionally charged world premiere on
Round House's second
stage in Silver Spring is put a cherubic face on
horror. It's not the banality of evil they embody;
it's the
suburbanization of it.
The
idea of negative synergy, the notion that this vengeful,
tortured pair -- medicated,
bullied and
ignored -- found
in each other the perverse strength to carry
out a terrorist assault, suffuses columbinus.
(The title is Latin for "dove-like," the authors
say.) In one blistering sequence, the boys nourish
each other's destructive
fury at their keyboards. The flurry of rage-stoked
instant messages, projected onto an immense screen
behind the stage,
gives you an almost clinical sense of how the blending
of two lonely and damaged souls could make for
one incendiary cocktail.
In
its rawest moments, columbinus leads
you through the scary catacombs of American
adolescence. The
play doesn't only deal in effect. It wants
you to see the probable cause, and it lays the blame
for extreme disaffection
among the most vulnerable of the young in a
closed
social hierarchy that can severely punish those
who are weak,
or indifferent to its rules. In a first act
that posits a landscape of the American high school
as more cutthroat
than Wall Street, it is the jockocracy that
is
painted as the most malevolent force. Two actors
with imposing
muscles blithely taunt and toss around the
slighter boys as if there were no possibility for payback.
Teenagers
are nothing if not shortsighted.
Columbinus,
presented in the style of a cautionary documentary,
has some shortcomings.
The impressionistic
first act, which in purposefully generic
fashion explores the pressures and identity crises
that occur on the cusp
of adulthood, is repetitive and overlong.
Some incidents, such as the reading aloud in class
of an actual essay rife
with violent images by Klebold, are searing,
even surreally funny. (The disembodied voice of a teacher interrupts to
correct Klebold's grammar.) But other scenes
merely recall obvious moments from a thousand TV shows -- parents at
a dinner table who are too busy to listen,
for instance -- or they underline the same point again
and again about
the dark side of the need to kowtow or conform.
In
the more graphic second act, the violence is followed
by a predictable earnestness of
a sort
that calls
to mind the perfunctory solemnity of a cable
news recap.
Nevertheless,
the production, directed with a surefire sense of theatricality
by PJ
Paparelli
and performed
by a flawless cast of eight, offers invaluable
insight into
the primitive psychological warfare that
goes on in high school hallways and cafeterias.
The
script,
by
a writing
team headed by Paparelli, former associate
director of Washington's Shakespeare Theatre
and now artistic
director
of the Perseverance Theatre in Juneau,
Alaska, is heavily based on research. (Stephen Karam
and Sean
McNall are
credited as co-writers.) The words of Harris
and Klebold, as well
as court records, statements of Columbine
witnesses
and interviews with high school students
across the country
are incorporated into the proceedings.
Other conversations are invented.
This
technique is borrowed from a burgeoning genre, that of
fact-based
plays like "The Laramie Project," about
the hate-crime murder of a gay man in Wyoming,
and "The
Exonerated," an evening pieced together
from the testimony of death row inmates
whose sentences had been commuted
or overturned.
The
play moves inexorably through a depiction of the everyday
agonies
of high school
to the specific
events
that fueled
the wrath at Columbine. In a series of
monologues, the actors, portraying a
variety of familiar
types (the geek,
the goth, the prep) unburden themselves
to us. Required to attempt a foul shot
in a
pickup game
of basketball,
a non-athlete (James Flanagan) confides
his paralyzing fear of humiliation. Frozen
in
a spotlight --
Dan Covey's lighting is excellent throughout
-- the
terrified young
man is utterly alone.
At
this tender age, everyone is locked in solitary confinement
with
his insecurities.
Most kids, columbinus suggests,
serve out their sentences, scarred
but intact. For a few others, the
psychic isolation can have deadly
consequences.
Paparelli
orchestrates theater technology expertly. JJ Kaczynski's
projections
are consistently
vivid and precisely
timed, and Martin Desjardins's sound
design fills the space with the ambient
noise
of adolescence. You'd
know that
metallic boooop!, signaling the end
of a classroom period, anywhere.
More piercingly,
Desjardins
creates a soundscape
for gunfire that invades the senses
as intimately
as blood beating against the eardrum.
Nowhere
is the precision more apparent than in the work of the
actors playing
the killers.
Rogers's
Klebold is
a semisweet counterpoint to Miller's
sour Harris. You can imagine Rogers's
fumbling
character
having endured
in a
marginal niche had he not found
Harris. In the most
tender moment "columbinus" accords
him, Rogers awkwardly tries to
reach out to a drama-club girl
(Ekatrina
Oleska)
who has asked him to rehearse the
balcony scene from "Romeo
and Juliet."
But
in this real-life teenage tragedy, it is Harris with
whom Klebold
seals his suicide
pact. They
map out their
siege in a savage scene in which
each, in turn,
melts down and recovers. It's
the mutual validation they
find that
leads to disaster. But it's Miller's
Harris who lights the fuse. He
plays Harris as
a clueless volcano,
angry at everything and at a
loss to understand why. At a
poignant turn in the story, a
bully knocks his
bottle of antidepressants
to the ground and he's forced
to grope for his pills on his hands
and knees,
to salvage
his
one source
of stability.
The
daily indignities and brutalities to which Harris and
Klebold are
subjected do not, of
course, fully
explain their barbaric act.
The piece at
one point suggests a
parallel
between Harris and Klebold
and the notorious young joy-killers
of the
1920s, Leopold
and Loeb. The
comparison is useful.
If, at times, columbinus employs a grievous event
for its own
purposes, it never lowers
itself to the
kind of sensationalism that
dogged the case of Leopold
and Loeb.
At its best, the play is
a plea for illuminating
the corrosive secrets young
people harbor, secrets that
should not
have led two mixed-up boys
and more than a dozen
others to early graves.
Potomac
Stages: (excerpts)
Reviewed
March 7
Running time 2:30 - one intermission
General Admission seating
Performed at Round House Theatre, Silver Spring
[PJ Paparelli]
brings a sense of intelligence, dramatic intensity and clarity...
|
[...] Storyline: On
April 19, 1999, two seniors
at Colorado's Columbine
High School
went on a shooting spree,
killing thirteen
of their classmates
before committing
suicide in the school cafeteria
after the bombs
they had planted failed
to detonate.
This theater
piece begins by examining
what high school
life is like in America
today and
then concentrates
on the specific case of
Columbine
High with
an epilogue-style
look at the reactions of
the family and friends of
the shooters
and the victims.
PJ
Paparelli, who left the Potomac
Region
to take the
position
of Artistic Director
at Alaska's
Perseverance
Theatre,
is very much
in evidence in our region this
season. His
Romeo
and Juliet
just closed
at the Folger
while this
new piece
which he conceived, co-wrote
and directed
has now opened
at the Round
House, Silver
Spring. Thus, his
reach
extends
from the
classics to the
experimental
and he brings a sense
of intelligence,
dramatic
intensity and clarity
to each. This
is the first
project of
a rather grandly named "United States
Theatre Project" which will
undertake
to develop "epic dramatic experiences
that examine a human
event, condition or phenomena intrinsic to
our social and political fabric as Americans." Quite
a goal, that.
The
cast of eight young
performers
is headed
by Karl
Miller who is well
known to
local
theatergoers
(Passing
the Love
of Women,
The Seagull, The
Maids)
and newcomer
Will Rogers
as
the two
disturbed
teens at
the center
of
the tragedy.
Miller's
feral intensity
contrasts
with Rogers
cooler,
nearly detached
pliability
in equally
compelling
performances.
The other
six
take on
multiple roles
ranging
from classmates
to
teachers
to parents
in
an
effort
to recreate
the environment
from
which the
horror
emerged. They
are at
their best when
working
as classmates
for
their ages
lend them
to those
roles.
It
all takes
place
on
a large,
steel
gray
floor painted
with
the patterns
of a
basketball court
before
a giant
black
board
creating
a
chilling,
unwelcoming
but somehow
awfully
familiar
space.
Sound
designer Martin
Desjardins
provides
many
audio cues
but none
as
impressive
as the
hollow
echo
of each shot
during
the
shooting
rampage.
The sound
of each
shot
is triggered
by either
Miller
or Rogers
pounding
on that
board,
which
intensifies
the sense
of
remove
between
the shooter
and
the shot
while
allowing the inner
thoughts
of
the killers
to be
voiced ("Wow,
this
is cool!")
Paparelli
stages
the actual
shooting
session
at a
hypnotically leisurely
pace.
No slow-motion
gimmickry,
just
a total absence
of any
feeling
of "let's
get this
part
over
with." The
pace
makes
the event
all the
harder
to witness
-
which,
of course,
is the
whole
point.
