Play about mass shooting comes with eerie timing to Berkeley
It’s always too soon.
Right after the mass shooting at a high school in Parkland, Florida, may be a tricky time to produce a play about a mass shooting, but in America so little time passes between massacres that it seems like there’s never a time when one hasn’t just happened.
Opening tonight at Berkeley Repertory Theatre, “Office Hour” is the play Julia Cho wrote right after “Aubergine,” her touching rumination on family, food and letting go, which Berkeley Rep premiered in 2016 and which won the Glickman Award for best play to premiere in the Bay Area that year. “Office Hour” premiered at South Coast Repertory in 2016, and another production played New York’s Public Theater a few months ago.
Cho wrote “Office Hour” in response to the 2007 Virginia Tech shooting, in which a college senior killed 32 people and wounded 17 others on campus in Blacksburg, Virginia, before killing himself. Something that haunted the playwright was that unlike most mass shooters who are white males, this one was a fellow Korean-American.
Cho’s 80-minute thriller is a nerve-racking meeting between a college writing instructor and a withdrawn and menacing student in a hoodie and sunglasses who’s been writing some awfully disturbing things.
Making the encounter tenser still, it keeps spinning off into different alternate scenarios of what might happen next. After a horrific event it’s only natural to run through any number of scenarios of how things might have gone differently, and Cho’s play brings that desperate quest for the right “what if” to life.
Details: Through Mar. 25; Berkeley Rep’s Peet’s Theatre, Berkeley; $30-$97; 510-647-2949, www.berkeleyrep.org.