Nate (Ben Hirshhorn, left) charms Lily/Mrs. Friedman (Annabelle Gurwitch) into giving him an extension on his assignment.
Michelle Kholos Brooks writes powerful dramas about salient issues. Together with director Sarah Norris, she has created a viscerally, emotionally gripping tableau of remembrance. With maximum impact, Kholos Brooks’s Room 1214 hits gun violence out of the ballpark.
The characters’ names are fictional, but the play’s account of the massacre, the deadliest of any U.S. school, is fact based. It stems from Kholos Brooks’s interview with Ivy Shlamis, whose students in Room 1214 were among the casualties. In a reimagined tableau, the living and the dead at Marjory Stoneham Douglas High School accompany Lily, aka Ms. Friedman (Annabelle Gurwitch), their bereaved teacher, for a final look at Room 1214. It’s demolition day for the 1200 building, but the memories are indelible.
Lily has returned to the school for the first time since the shootings on Valentine’s Day 2018. As she sifts through the students’ belongings and her own, she remembers her Holocaust history class, disrupted by the shooter’s rampage. Barbed wire around the room’s periphery and an Arbeit Macht Frei image bear witness to unbridled human destruction; ironically, Lily juxtaposes these with the shooter’s swastika-adorned boots and bullets.
Nate (Hirschhorn) and Hannah (Andrea Negrete) gaze at each other with sorrow about their unfulfilled dreams.
Both the tapping on Lily’s prized Tibetan gong, and the first of Elaine Wong’s subtle lighting changes portend that spirits will be summoned. First Nate (Ben Hirshhorn) and then Hannah (Andrea Negrete), Lily’s student victims, appear alive and exhilarated, although their lives were snuffed out in an instant. Nate’s singing charms Lily into extending an assignment deadline; Hannah mimes painting the wall and affirms the phrase “Never Forget,” prominently displayed in the classroom. Ellie (Thyme Briscoe), and two other survivors, only later identified as B (Kleo Mitrokostas), and G (Alessandro Yokoyama), playfully dance and laugh with Nate and Hannah. Recollections of their Holocaust lessons deeply resonate with them. Lily cannot, nor does she want to forget. More than once, the gong summons the dead and living.
They all transition to relive another irony. February 14, a day for love, becomes one of nightmare and loss. David Allen’s utilitarian classroom highlights the inadequate shelter-in-place options. Nate huddles in a corner, while others lie prone under desks. The trench-coated shooter mimes smashes the window glass, turns the lock, enters the classroom, and aims his assault rifle at Lily. As Nate cowers, grieving over his aborted future, he rails against the building’s lack of closets and other safe spaces, adequate security, and timely intervention by first responders. The students (including B and G), wear placards representing all those who failed the victims. The offenders are banished, for their uselessness, one by one.
Ms. Friedman (Gurwitch, right) hands B (Kleo Mitrokostas) a Valentine's Day teddy bear, one of the few positive memories of that tragic day. Photographs by Hunter Canning.
In Room 1214, the anonymity of the shooter’s name augments the universality of this tragedy. This Goth-attired individual could represent any number of malcontents—bullied or otherwise damaged adolescents or youths whose potentially deadly behaviors have been either ignored or inadequately addressed by schools, law enforcement, or mental health professionals.
Jenny Gorn’s projections are spot-on, from the child’s drawing of a smiling stick figure to the silhouettes of the swaying students. The former image precedes a bleak narrative underscoring this “child’s” progressively more disturbing adolescence. He hears voices and has other psychoses.
“Maybe it was before the voices he said were inside his head started haranguing him, or before he was rejected, or felt like an outcast, I don’t know, how am I supposed to know? Maybe he was just bad? Can a child be born bad?” Lily asks.
By the time the shooter is expelled from high school it is already too late, for he has purchased the weapon he’ll use. He times his access to the school gate and building with precision.
In shorter and shorter intervals, a booming voice announces that the building’s visitors must leave with their belongings before the detonations begin. Lily doesn’t care. She is riveted to her students and the trauma of the shootings.
In her playwright’s statement, Kholos Brooks implores us to “shake off our dull acceptance of the hate and gun violence…” After all, her pleadings align with Elie Wiesel’s cautionary imperative, as projected on Room 1214’s screen: “…not only are we responsible for the memories of the dead, we are also responsible for what we are doing with those memories.”
Room 1214 runs at 59E59 Theaters (59 E. 59th St.) through Dec. 8. Evening performances are Tuesdays through Saturdays at 7:15 p.m.; Matinees are at 2:15 p.m. on Wednesday (November 27 only), Saturdays, and Sundays. For more information, or to purchase tickets, call the box office at 646-892-7999 or visit info@59e59.org.
Playwright: Michelle Kholos Brooks
Director: Sarah Norris
Scenic Design: Daniel Allen
Lighting Design: Elaine Wong
Costume Design: Kara Branch
Sound Design: Jennie Gorn
