Columbinus

American Theater Co.

Chicago, (773) 409-4125

****

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An artist “has a moral obligation to raise his or her game” when re-creating a horrific event like the 1999 mass shooting at Colorado’s Columbine High School, said Chris Jones in the Chicago Tribune. And that’s all the more true in the wake of similar attacks in Newtown, Conn., and elsewhere; such events are now “perilously close to feeling routine.” PJ Paparelli, who co-wrote Columbinus in 2005 and now directs this freshly revised version, clearly understood the ethical imperatives of his project. The play is a “remarkable artistic achievement.” No one who can bear to watch should miss it.

Columbinus roots the pathology of the two shooters in challenges familiar to adolescents everywhere, said Barbara Vitello in the Chicago Daily Herald. Every teenager in this play has insecurities. After the braying of their morning alarm clocks, we meet these students—“or rather, we meet their stereotypes: the smart kid, the nice girl, the jock”—as each prepares for school and gets ready to assume a given role in the school’s hierarchy. We also see the events that drive bullied loners Dylan (Eric Folks) and Eric (Matthew Bausone) over the edge. In fact, the boys’ descent into murderous rage is “sublimely rendered.” While Paparelli and his co-writer, Stephen Karam, make no excuses for them, they seem to be asking, “What if?—what if teenagers were more tolerant, school officials more sensitive, and parents more prescient?”

The actual shooting is portrayed with “a visceral intensity that had me wondering whether I was going to make it through to render judgment on the third act,” said Charles Isherwood in The New York Times. “Fortunately, I did,” and that last act, newly added and based on recent interviews with survivors, police, and other Littleton, Colo., residents, is a “moving collage of communal grief, anger, and confusion.” The show’s eight superb actors play, among others, the mother of a victim, the school’s oddly upbeat principal, and survivors of the shooting who’ve reached adulthood. They struggle to understand the shooters’ motivations but fail, as does the mother of one of the shooters. As she reads a letter confessing how love for her son blinded her to his growing anger, her anguish “cuts to the heart.”