After Wave of Shootings, Tragedy Put on Stage

A few days after the Springfield, Ore., high school shootings last year, award-winning playwright William Mastrosimone sat down to dinner with his son and, in response to the usual question--”How was your day at school?”--got an answer that felt like a kick in the stomach.

“We walked into school today and somebody had written on the blackboard, ‘I’m going to kill everybody in this class and the teacher too,’ ” his eighth-grader told him.

After dinner, Mastrosimone went to his desk, and a play started to take shape. All night he kept writing. “It just poured out of me like vomit. That’s the way it was.” By morning, he had the draft of a one-act play, “Bang Bang You’re Dead,” a painful, poignant account of a 15-year-old school killer and the frail, hopeful lives he ended.

The play had its debut earlier this month in Eugene, Ore., a few miles from Springfield, and was followed up with a performance at the junior high Mastrosimone’s son attends in Enumclaw, Wash., south of Seattle. With the shootings in Littleton, Colo., reopening the wounds yet again, performances have been scheduled next week before state legislators in Washington and in the coming months in at least six other states.

The play bears a disturbing resemblance to news headlines in recent years, following a wave of school shootings in Colorado, Oregon, Kentucky and Arkansas. It opens in a jail cell, where a 15-year-old inmate startles out of his repose at the sight of another youth. “Why’d you kill me?” the boy asks. “It was more fun than droppin’ dudes in a video game,” the prisoner replies.

“It’s a kid’s perspective. . . . The idea that kids do for the moment, and don’t worry about what happens later. It tells you what happens later,” said Gayle Atteberry, who went to the premiere in Eugene a little less than a year after her 16-year-old son, Ryan, was shot in the face at Springfield’s Thurston High School. He has recovered.

For Mastrosimone--who has offered his play free of charge on the Internet (www.bangbangyouredead.com) for production--the work was an attempt to begin assuming responsibility for what he sees as the entertainment industry’s role in anesthetizing children to violence. “I am a person who has written violent movies, and I’m a person who makes a living in Hollywood,” said Mastrosimone, author of the play “Extremities” and the TV miniseries “Sinatra,” in addition to a new play about media-inspired youth violence, “Like Totally Weird,” that’s bound for Broadway this fall.

“But I have four kids. I live in Enumclaw, Wash., which is like the 1950s, you know. And I think I’m probably speaking for every parent in America when I say I feel like my house is the Alamo, and that I know I’m not going to win, and I’m determined to go down with my boots on to fight the pernicious influences that come through my television, that come through videos and video games and movies.”

Thurston High drama teacher Mike Fisher said he received dozens of TV movie pitches after the shootings and threw most of them away in disgust. He picked up Mastrosimone’s note and realized it had come from a writer who had explored, in “Extremities,” the subject of rape and reprisal in a way he had never forgotten. “All of a sudden it hit me, if there was a guy that had any background in turning tragedy into a meaningful discussion, this was the guy,” Fisher said.

Mastrosimone sent a draft of the play, and Fisher consulted his top acting students--some of whom had been touched personally by the tragedy. Most of them wanted to proceed. “Nobody had a 100% buy-in. I didn’t. But we were willing to talk to him. We talked for hours, that first call, and subsequently during the next few weeks, we talked every day. The play began to take its form that way,” Fisher said. “He had the framework, the ideas, and we sort of provided the emotional content.”

Mastrosimone sent the play to student workshops in Florida, and it was there that students injected some of the most poignant lines in the production, scenes where the dead students confronting the young killer talk about the things they miss in their lost lives.

“I miss lying on my bed in the dark, falling asleep to a CD.”

“I miss seeing Jody when she has that look on her face that she’s got another stupid joke to tell me.”

“I miss making my mom laugh so hard she can’t hardly breathe.”

As the lights fade, the young captive is overcome. “I didn’t know it would be forever,” he says. “I thought I could just hit the reset button and start over.”

School administrators and city officials were guarded at first, Fisher said. “No one wanted to put our pain on display, and none of us ever wanted to be seen marching around on stage in some sort of mawkish assault on our pain. The whole point was to get the message out there. If we help put the show together, we give it emotional validity. Because we were there.”

“I at first kind of went, ‘No way . . . how dare they?’ ” recalled Springfield Fire Chief Dennis Murphy, who heads Ribbons of Promise, a national group against school violence that was organized after the Springfield shootings. Eventually, the group sponsored the play, rented a hall in Eugene to produce it and put the script out for national distribution.

“We saw it, and we were just awe-struck with the communication, the powerful message about the consequences of youth violence,” Murphy said. “I thought, ‘Holy mackerel, what a tool.’ ”

A day after its April 7 debut in Eugene, the play was performed at Enumclaw Junior High, where drama teacher Jay Thornton said even the young seventh- and eighth-graders responded strongly.

“Junior high school kids, they don’t always feel the magnitude of everything. And they sat really quietly through the whole production, and there was a lot of serious conversation about it,” Thornton said. “It moved them.”

Mastrosimone, 51, said he wrote the play “as a parent, not as a playwright.” It came in part, he said, out of a growing conviction that his own generation had failed its children.

“The baby boomers, we have failed our kids, generally speaking. We have failed to transmit the values our parents gave us. Our parents suffered through a Depression, fought at least two world wars and raised their kids in prosperous times, and we benefited from all that prosperity.

“But what happened is that perhaps it came too easy to us, as a generation. And that we were very lax in the way that we raised our kids. We did not transmit those values, the core values, the basic belief in life, the basic belief in positive forces like love and cooperation and tolerance. We took it for granted, that those things were handed down to us, but we didn’t realize how our parents suffered to have those values. They’re not gifts, they’re things you need to work on.”

Mastrosimone said the entertainment industry must accept a share of the blame, for the “steady diet of nihilistic entertainment” that youths are subjected to by way of movies, television and video games.

“Now I’m searching my own soul, the way I wish everyone in Hollywood would, because we are blessed,” he said. “It’s a very lucrative profession, but with that should come a higher obligation, because we influence so many people.”

Parents have their own obligations, he said. “This thing in Littleton happens, and everybody’s wondering, ‘Why did they do it?’ They’re asking the questions now that, if somebody had asked them before, this wouldn’t have happened. If some parent had said, ‘Why are you unhappy today? Why do you want a Web site? What are you going to put on it? And what are these weird drawings over here?’ If somebody had been interested enough in his life, this might not have happened.”

Nichole Buckholtz, an 18-year-old Thurston student who was shot in the leg, signed up to play a mother who is shot by her son. When it went into rehearsals, she couldn’t do it. “I know it’s theater, and you’re not really supposed to have the actors’ true emotions on stage. But certain things you can’t get away from. It just hit a little too close.”

Another student took over the mother role, and Buckholtz took a less emotionally demanding part.

For her, it was all worth it in a single day in Pendleton, Ore., where the production was entered in a regional student drama competition. After the performance, Buckholtz said, she was approached by one of the cast members. “She goes, ‘I wanted to thank you guys. I had actually been thinking of committing suicide, but I never thought how it would affect the people that I knew. Now after seeing this, I just can’t.’ We were just like, ‘Wow.’ That was just truly great to hear.”

Sabrina Steger, whose 15-year-old daughter, Kayce, was killed in a school shooting in West Paducah, Ky., flew to Eugene with her other two children to see the play. At a news conference with other parents, she said she had to take a box of tissues along with her.

But that, she said, was the point. “The more powerful it is, hopefully the stronger the message.”