Syracuse University Drama Department - Columbinus By Stephen Karam and PJ Paparelli
Part of Syracuse University’s (Syracuse, NY) College of Visual and Performing Arts, the Drama Department offers BFA degrees in acting, musical theatre, design/technical theatre and stage management. Housed in the same theatre complex as the professional company Syracuse Stage, the department combines outstanding training with a variety of performing opportunities. Previous appearances at the Quaker Meeting House include The Laramie Project (2004), A Remarkable Story (2005) and Embedded (2006).
http://vpa.syr.edu/drama/
April 20, 1999. Columbine High School. 13 dead, plus the two killers. This sensitive docudrama illuminates the disturbing realities of adolescent culture by exploring this horrific event. A portrait of the rage that repeats and repeats.
Performances:
4th - 9th August , 16:15 to 17:50
Price: £5.00 (£3.00)
Book tickets on the Fringe website
QFP 23.09
We are all the poorer for the crushing of one man, since the dimming of the Light anywhere darkens us all.
Michael Sorenson, 1986
Not a fun hour, but powerful theatre.
I told a friend a week or two ago that this play was coming to the venue. ‘Oh no!’ she said, and changed the subject. She lives in Dunblane.What happened there two or three years before the Columbine event still make it, for those involved, too raw to be easily talked about. So, too, in Littleton, CO.
Syracuse University Drama have become regular August visitors to the Quaker Meeting House and produce work of a high standard. This production does not disappoint. The ‘docudrama’, written by PJ Paparelli and Stephen Karam and first staged in 2005, vividly paints the background and the events leading up to the killings at Columbine High School in April 1999, using ensemble work on the simplest set, chairs the only props: the ritual of school life, with its potential for the isolation and humiliation of individuals, the failure of guidance counselling to reach the misfits, the power of popularity and the building inner rage of those who don’t achieve it. The history lesson points this up : Darwinian theory makes for winners and losers but, when it comes to the human story, the losers don’t necessarily just get lost.The stories of Cain and Abel and of Adolf Hitler are used to remind us ominously of this.
There were two killers involved at Columbine. The strange but not so strange interdependence they developed – and the stresses in it – are well portrayed. Their parents had no idea their sons’ rooms were being used as bomb factories and gun stores. A CCTV still, a record of e-mail interchange between the two and recording of a mobile phone message made from the school during the event root the story in its actuality before eye-witness accounts from survivors in the school library are delivered by the cast straight to audience.
And the aftermath? As with Dunblane, it still rolls on, of course. No adequate explanation, except that alienation and social isolation can, in some individuals, even notably intelligent ones, create intense inner hatred both for themselves and for others and a need to kick back, to make a mark, to be remembered.
The play offers no answers; it just reminds us of the stark potential consequences of our inability to treat each other as we would wish to be treated. It is well played by a cast of very even talents and the direction keeps the story moving and engages the attention. Not a fun hour, but powerful theatre.
Phil Lucas