The ripple effect
I’m still in standing-ovation mode for the Santa Fe High School theater’s closing and sold-out performance (“‘It’s almost too topical of a play,’ ” March 1). The students, director and stagehands delivered a gripping play, 26 Pebbles, by New York City playwright Eric Ulloa.
The small but sophisticated campus theater offered an evocative stage set that, along with 19 teenage actors, transported our packed audience to Newtown, Conn., and to its Sandy Hook Elementary School. The timeline of Dec. 14, 2012, and ensuing months, spun around 20-yearold Adam Lanza’s murder of 20 children and 6 teachers: the 26 “pebbles.” Like pebbles thrown cross water, their deaths set off rippling effects that made this theatrical choice so timely.
In welcoming the audience, theater director Reed Meschefske said that Mr. Ulloa had created the play from interviews with Newtown parents six months after that 2012 day. He also said that preparation for this threenight March play had begun on Jan. 7, 2018. It is chilling to know that 26 Pebbles was in process in our town just 32 days before yet another gunman killed 17 and injured 14 people in Parkland, Fla.
In the theater, it felt as if we were holding our collective breath as the actors became the parents, clergy, emergency responders and other townspeople sharing their stories. We watched the characters, going about their daily errands and jobs, metamorphose into terrified parents and friends. We watched them in the aftermath of 26 funerals and a media army’s invasion of the previously peaceful streets and parks. And we saw them evolve to try to understand where we all go from there.
Most gripping, to me, was the ultimate outreach — compassion for two other Sandy Hook/Newtown victims from that day. They were the suicidal gunman Adam Lanza and his murdered mother, for a total of 28 deaths. Whatever went wrong in that family signals the need for more help and understanding of troubled people, everywhere, before they irrevocably enter the dark side.
Still a somewhat newcomer (2½ years) to Santa Fe, I had never seen the Santa Fe High campus until Saturday night. I am humbled by the courage, initiative and foresight in the school’s producing 26 Pebbles. The teens, director and theater team should feel proud for confronting a difficult subject so forthrightly and for bringing a message of hope to our community: The ripple effect of compassion and of not giving up the struggle to end mass murders in our schools, concerts, churches and movie theaters.
Susan Haynes, with her husband, Bob Borson, became a full-time Santa Fe resident in June 2015. As a professional writer and editor in cities across the U.S., she recently completed a manuscript for her memoir, The Heart of a Murder: Me, My Sister and Her Killer.