On a Chicago stage, students relive Columbine
It was December when Ben Dicke, theater department chair at The Chicago Academy for the Arts, approached Jason Patera, the head of school, to share his vision for the spring play.
“Ben said, ‘Look, I want to do this play “Columbinus,’ ” Patera recalled last week. “I said, ‘Is it about what I think it’s about?’ He said, ‘Yeah.’
“Immediately I had these two conflicting thoughts,” Patera said. “There’s no way we can do this play. And we absolutely have to do this play.”
“Columbinus” tells the story of two teenagers walking into their suburban high school and killing 12 students, a teacher and themselves — inspired, of course, by the 1999 murders at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colo. The play was co-written by P.J. Paparelli and Stephen Karam and performed in 2013 at American Theater Company in Chicago, where Paparelli would later become artistic director. (Paparelli died at age 40 in 2015; American Theater Company shut recently.)
None of the students in the Chicago Academy for the Arts cast was alive in 1999.
“To them, Columbine is like the Challenger explosion,” Patera said. “It’s like Vietnam. It’s like Pearl Harbor.”
It’s history.
It’s also the air they breathe.
Shortly after rehearsals began in January, a student opened fire in Marshall County High School in Kentucky, killing two classmates and wounding more than a dozen. A month later, 14 students and three school employees were shot to death at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla., and another 17 people were wounded.
“Whatever combination of bullying and social isolation and mental health and access to guns — whatever that recipe is, it hasn’t slowed down since Columbine,” said Dicke, who directs the show. “We all know that, and we all kind of fess up to that, and then we forget it and move on.
“What’s interesting now is the Parkland students have said, ‘Actually, we’re not going to forget about it and move on,’ “Dicke continued. “And how powerful for our students to be able to join that conversation.”
I watched a “Columbinus” rehearsal the evening before students around the country were scheduled to walk out of their classrooms en masse to protest gun violence. It left me both heartbroken and hopeful to watch kids also grapple with the topic on a much smaller stage, away from the glare of the national spotlight, removed from the safety of numbers.
“The first time we read through the library scene, which is where most of the students lost their lives, we took a break, and I went backstage, and I just cried,” Jacob Flores, 16, told me.
He plays Eric Harris, one of the gunmen.
“It’s definitely a lot emotionally,” he said. “But it’s a great responsibility to tell the story, and even more so to tell it as teenagers. It’s really our story.”
I asked Dicke if he worried — or if he fielded parental worries — that the material places an undue burden on the students.
“Is it an undue burden to have lockdown drills and active shooter drills?” Dicke said. “One of my kids just said, ‘School should be a place where I’m not worried about my safety,’ and yet we know that’s not true.
“I see this as an opportunity to continue an important conversation with our students, with our community, with our audience,” he continued. “I think it’s vital.”
Patera said the school has a history of tackling works that challenge students to think about difficult topics in a nuanced, complex way. They’ve staged “Doubt,” a play about sexual abuse in the Catholic church, and “Spring Awakening,” a musical about teenage sexuality.
“Our kids handle it in a very responsible and authentic and important way,” Patera said. “This is what art is for. This is what work that matters is for.”
Flores said “Columbinus,” with its mixture of horrific violence and runof-the-mill teenage exploits, is a reflection of both the lives of those in the cast and their mission as artists.
“This is an environment where we are challenged to use our art to send out messages,” he said. “We know that’s what we have to do. We know that’s important for us to do.”
It’s also, Dicke said, an opportunity to honor the countless lives affected by gun violence in the United States.
“Our kids kept saying, ‘How do we honor the victims of all of these shootings?’ “Dicke said. “Without giving anything away, I think the play allows us to stand alongside survivors and honor the victims both.”
It’s the right play at the right time, Patera said.
“I think our nation routinely underestimates what adolescents are capable of, and they’re certainly capable of wrestling with this work,” he said. “The students never saw it as controversial. They saw it as art that reflects their lives.”