Proactive Search for Potential Killers
Dennis Murphy and Ribbon of Promise
Corrections or additions?
This article by Joan Crespi was published in U.S. 1 Newspaper on June 23, 1999.
All rights reserved.
Valedictory — or Requiem?
Paducah, Jonesboro, Springfield." These place
names constitute a refrain spoken by characters in Trenton-born
William
Mastrosimone’s latest play, "Bang Bang You’re Dead." Before
they became notorious as the sites of fatal school shootings, few
people nationally were aware of these towns in Kentucky, Arkansas,
and Oregon. And since the play was completed, there have been fresh
additions to the geography of horror: Littleton, Colorado, where two
teens killed themselves and 13 others. Then Conyers, Georgia.
Mastrosimone has given his copyrighted play, "Bang Bang You’re
Dead," free, to school students everywhere. He intends it
particularly
for high school students and has posted it at
www.bangbangyouredead.com
so that students may download and perform it, free of charge to
audiences.
Or they can perform it outside school "in garages, street corners,
parks, houses of worship."
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Proactive Search for Potential Killers
Is Mastrosimone cashing in on school violence, as some detractors
have suggested? On the contrary. "The play is directed at the
potential killer in the audience," Mastrosimone emphasized in
a telephone interview from his home in Enumclaw, Washington. "It’s
a proactive search for kids in the audience entertaining homicidal
feelings." He adds, "This works because the potential killer’s
peers are looking at him. Kids know who the potential killers are.
Give the kids a tool that they can address the potential killer with,
and show that kid what his life is going to be like."
Mastrosimone’s 40-minute play requires 11 actors but little else.
Five actors each play multiple roles. The script was posted on the
Web on April 5, and by early June there were some 6,000 downloads
— or 6,000 potential productions. By June 2, the site had logged
close to 12,000 visitors.
"Bang bang" is the story of Josh, a fictional school shooter,
told in flashback. It is set in Josh’s jail cell the night after he
has killed five fellow students. At the play’s opening they appear
to him as figments of his imagination, each asking "Why me?"
Josh retorts "It was more fun than droppin’ dudes in a video
game."
And "Felt like it, okay?" and "It was fun."
The five dead teens appear repeatedly, first in memory as alive
pre-teens
playing "bang bang you’re dead," then as the returning dead,
to torment and toy with Josh and to remind him of the consequences
of his actions. They get inside his mind. They are individuals in
a chorus, and they become Greek furies; even as Josh becomes a kind
of "Everyteen" shooter.
The play depends less on action, than on the cumulative effect of
its various voices, their refrains and repetitions. Mastrosimone’s
pungent dialogue suits the characters. He captures teenage lingo —
"duh," "cool," "I’m outta here." Josh’s
encounters,
which move fluidly into one another, are witty — particularly
his session with a psychotherapist — and psychologically
penetrating,
getting behind the adolescent’s mask. For Mastrosimone attempts not
only to convey the sadness of those killed, but to probe the killer’s
motives — his wish to make history, to become a legend, to feel
powerful, to get back at those who taunted him, to avoid being the
butt of a joke.
Josh manipulates his parents into buying him a rifle,
kills a deer to "be a man," and eventually kills his parents.
His victims return to tell him about the many small pleasures of life
of which he has robbed them. "I’ll never be married in a white
dress," "I’ll never play catch with my son," "I’ll
never see Paris," they tell him. At the play’s end, Josh is
devastated
and laments: "I didn’t know it would be forever. . . I thought
I could just hit the reset button and start over."
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Dennis Murphy and Ribbon of Promise
The Springfield, Oregon, fire chief, Dennis Murphy, who responded
to the shooting in the Thurston High School cafeteria, was appalled
when he first heard about Mastrosimone’s play. Now Murphy endorses
the show, as does Ribbon of Promise
(www.ribbonofpromise.org),
the group he helped found to end school violence.
What do young people think of the play? When Thurston drama teacher
Mike Fisher brought it to his students, some who were present in the
cafeteria during the shooting, some who were wounded, "they
embraced
the play whole-heartedly," says Mastrosimone, "and together
we began an odyssey that has changed me forever."
Says Nick Smith, 16, who played Josh in the play’s world premier in
Eugene, Oregon, "Some people think we’re exploiting the shooting.
But we’re in this to get the message out."
Does the play provoke copycat violence? "The Register-Guard,"
Eugene-Springfield’s newspaper, reports that youth behavior
specialists
agree that "the show could be a powerful tool for prevention and
intervention." Columnist, Karen McCowan (while objecting to a
hunting scene), sums up: "There’s nothing in this show that
glorifies
or glamorizes violence. It focuses largely on the lasting
consequences.
. . for the shooter as well as the victims. . . and the rippling
consequences for family, friends, schools, and communities. . . The
show properly indicts the violent television, movies, and video games
that desensitize our kids and train them to find amusement in killing.
[And] it reminds teens of the potentially deadly effects of teasing,
taunting, and
ostracizing troubled classmates." But the play is not for
everyone,
she notes. It is not for those still traumatized by events, nor for
those who lost children in the shootings.
Does the play work in deterring violence? It could be part of the
answer, Mastrosimone says. On two occasions kids have approached
Mastrosimone to tell him they were planning school violence (he
declines to say where), but that after seeing the play, changed their
minds. He also
tells of a girl in Eugene who "came backstage with a tear-streaked
face to say she had made up her mind to kill herself, but seeing the
play made her believe in life once more, and she thanked us all for
saving her life."
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Jonesboro Shooting
Mastrosimone wrote the first draft of the 40-minute "Bang Bang
You’re Dead" one sleepless night in May, 1998, about two months
after the March school shooting in Jonesboro, Arkansas, when two boys,
ages 11 and 13, killed four girls and a teacher and wounded 10, and
a week after the shooting in Springfield, Oregon, when a 15-year-old
boy killed his parents at home, then went to his high school, opened
fire, and killed two teenagers, wounding 20 others.
Since then much of the text has been revised, but the story is
unchanged.
And the play may be different at every performance. When students
portraying dead students recite the things they will miss most from
their teen years, the script suggest they name their own choices.
Mastrosimone says the immediate impetus for the play came when, three
days after the Oregon shooting, his own 15-year-old son casually
mentioned
at the dinner table that, entering his high school classroom for
English,
he found written on the blackboard, "I’m going to kill everyone
in this class. And the teacher, too." While the culprit was
discovered
and expelled (the boy said it was a joke), the message to Mastrosimone
was "no child is safe in any school anymore."
In fact, the germ of the play was planted several years before. In
his essay, "Confessions of a Violent Movie Writer,"
Mastrosimone
has written that in 1994, seeing the films "Natural Born
Killers"
and "Pulp Fiction" (neither of which he wrote), when young
kids in the audience cheered killings with the glee of Romans watching
humans thrown the lions, or found spattered brains howlingly funny,
he "felt shame belonging to the same community."
Before, the screenwriter had considered that his brand of violence
was justified. In his film "The Beast," a Soviet tank is used
to execute a rebel. In "The Burning Season," his film about
the life of Brazilian hero Chico Mendez, a man is set on fire while
residents of his Amazonian village are forced to watch.
Mastrosimone says the recent "plague of kids killing kids in
unlikely
places spread over the country" share some common characteristics.
"These kids were not psychotics," he says. "They were
normal kids living our fantasies." Mastrosimone also realized
that, like Oedipus, "the cause of the plague upon my land. . .
was myself." A week after the play premiered in Eugene, multiple
school killings took place in Littleton. Then Conyers.
Eight school shootings in 19 months. The movie industry was silent.
They may not acknowledge responsibility, but troubled kids and an
accumulation of violent entertainment produce a violent reality, says
Mastrosimone. "The whole country could run around confiscating
guns," and that won’t stop school violence. "This play is
the only game in the country right now."
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William Mastrosimone
Mastrosimone was born in New Jersey in 1947, the fourth of five
children.
His father was in construction and business, his mother stayed at
home. Raised in Trenton and Lawrenceville, he graduated from the
Pennington
School. He spent 3-1/2 years at Tulane University, dropping out
shortly
before graduation because he wanted to be a writer. He later attended
Rider College for one year, earning his BA in 1973; then earned an
MFA at Rutgers in 1977.
Mastrosimone became widely known for his second play
"Extremities," in which a near-rape victim turns tables on
her attacker, imprisons him in a fireplace, and tortures him. The
play, with onstage violence and gripping, brutal dialogue, is among
the seven in his "Collected Plays," published by Smith and
Kraus in 1993. He is currently finishing a romantic comedy, "King
of the Wedding Crashers," for Warner Brothers, and finishing a
play, "Water to Wine," to be produced at Actors Theater of
Louisville next year.
He moved to Seattle from Trenton in 1986, and to Enumclaw, Washington,
in 1987. His home is an hour from Seattle, where Mastrosimone had
gone to work with the Seattle Repertory Theater, and a couple of hours
flight from Los Angeles, where Mastrosimone works as a screenwriter.
He loves Enumclaw, situated in the foothills of Mount Rainier, on
the edge of a wilderness. Elk, mountain lion, and bear appear in his
backyard. But he will move back to Pennington on August 1 with his
wife, his stepsons ages 12 and 15, and two daughters 2 and 3. He has
bought a house there and wants his children to enjoy the benefit of
their extended New Jersey family. (He says he’s probably related to
all the Mastrosimones here.) He also wants his children to attend
his alma mater, the Pennington School.
Mastrosimone says his message to Hollywood traffickers of gratuitous
violence is a simple one: "Stop seeing kids as income. Kids today
are the most exploited generation in history — not in body, but
in mind and spirit." Mastrosimone’s play seeks to change that,
change values. And for his own kids? He’s coming home.
— Joan Crespi
the Web at www.bangbangyouredead.com. Free.
Corrections or additions?
This page is published by PrincetonInfo.com
— the web site for U.S. 1 Newspaper in Princeton, New Jersey.
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