Play About Teen Killer Misses Point

William Mastrosimone’s “Bang Bang You’re Dead” may be one of the few plays with its own Web site--www.bangbangyouredead.com.

It is surely one of the few for which the author requires interested producers to charge no admission and allows producers--once they concur with the licensing agreement--to download the play’s text at no charge.

In his program notes, Mastrosimone also explains his preference that his new play “be performed by kids, for kids.” The play premiered as recently as April, yet has already been produced at 20 venues across the United States. The author himself is planning an Aug. 12 production in the basement of his home.

What’s going on here? Playwrights of the stature of Mastrosimone (“Extremities,” “The Beast”) don’t operate this way. Not unless, that is, they’re driven by a cause. And, to be sure, “Bang Bang You’re Dead” is more a manifestation of a cause than it is a play.

Written in the wake of last year’ school massacres in Jonesboro, Ky., and Springfield, Ore., (and before the cataclysmic Columbine High massacre this year), “Bang Bang You’re Dead” also is written with the unedited rush of an expurgation, with the unmitigated urgency to create a piece of theater therapy.

Mastrosimone has made his play gratis so that teens can do it--anywhere, any time--and drive home the message that the ticking time bombs in their midst need to be recognized before it’s too late.

Depicting a high school student named Josh--now behind bars after murdering five classmates and haunted by the insistent ghosts of his victims--the brief work (under an hour) is designed as a lesson for emotionally damaged teens and to stir discussion.

It should also be staged with a raging urgency.

On almost all counts then, the staging at Lankershim Arts Center (a non-Equity production borrowing the space operated by the Road Theatre Company) is ill-conceived and misdirected.

That the production is not on a high school campus is exceedingly odd; odder still, the audiences coming to the arts center (if Sunday’s was typical) are far past their teens. With no context provided for the audience, the effect of co-directors Raul Saul and Jim Blackmon’s staging is that of a rushed, amateur, after-school show that’s meant to be good for you.

The fault isn’t entirely Saul and Blackmon’s. Mastrosimone structures his tragedy along Greek lines, with the aftermath as introduction, and a series of flashbacks following, as well as a chanting Greek chorus in the form of Josh’s victims, sometimes joined by the other five ensemble members.

The literary conceit is clear enough, but the play is stubbornly inert as drama and must be monstrously difficult for the nonprofessional actors it’s intended for. The chanting quickly becomes numbing through repetition, and Josh--even with his heinous crime--is never interestingly conceived.

As Josh, Adam Kaiz projects a quality of unformed, cornfed Midwestern plainness that hauntingly recalls the visages of some of the past year’s teen killers. Vocally, he and the rest of the cast are hard to listen to, and listening is the point of Mastrosimone’s exercise.

The point is also to do the play in the right place, the right context. Take the same show to a high school--then you’re reaching the people who count.

* “Bang Bang You’re Dead,” Lankershim Arts Center, 5108 Lankershim Blvd., North Hollywood. Saturdays-Sundays, 3 p.m. (At dusk this Saturday and Sunday.) Ends Aug. 1. (818) 759-3382. Free. Running time: 50 minutes.