From teacher-turned-playwright Alice Stanley Jr. comes a bold, darkly comic new play confronting one of the most urgent issues of contemporary American life. It explores friendship, identity and what it means to feel unseen while coming of age in a culture where mass violence has become routine.
Pleasance Courtyard (Baby Grand) from Wednesday 5th – Sunday 30th August (not 12th, 19th, 26th) at 12:45.
What led you to approach such a difficult subject through dark comedy, and how do you
find the right balance of humour and sensitivity?
I first began conceptualising this play in the wake of the 2018 Parkland tragedy. Gun control
became a “serious” national conversation, but as a public school teacher, I had a front row seat to
how teenagers actually talked about school shootings. While adults were somberly offering
“thoughts and prayers,” my students were joking about who would most likely bring an AK-47 to
class.
My students’ parents would be shocked to hear such “offensive” discussions, but I (sickly)
appreciated the gallows humour. We were overwhelmed with drills, constantly ruminating on being
murdered. If we didn’t laugh, we would have gone nuts. That’s when I realized how deep the
generational divide around mass shootings is.
In terms of finding the balance of humor and sensitivity…I’ll admit, some of the dark comedy in this
piece is abrasive. But I’ve modelled every word after things my former students really said.
How did working with young people across the U.S. shape the voice and perspective of the
play?
I often say I wrote the first draft of this play myself, but then it quickly became a ball of other
people’s trauma. It’s such an honor when, after seeing/reading the play, young people want to spill
their own sick thoughts (and sick jokes) at me. Everything they share I absorb and try to eventually
weave into the text.
Also, teenagers have been very happy to tell me, bluntly, when the slang I wrote was cringe or
“unc.” Shout-out to the cheeky teen at my first reading who warned I should not have either
character say “slay.” That’s how I learned “slay” is over.
In what ways does the idea of “being overshadowed” by a larger tragedy speak to the
emotional reality of the characters?
In the play, the characters survive a shooting that is literally immediately overshadowed by
another, which affects how they can, or can’t, heal. While that’s the story’s mechanism, I find a lot
of Americans feel overshadowed, generally, when it comes to our gun trauma.
Most of us have, at one point or another, worried we were about to be in a mass shooting. The
fear is so easily triggered now. All it takes is a metal water bottle hitting the floor at the movies or a
cork popping in a crowd. So we’re all walking around with this constant low-level fear, yet it can
feel almost rude to voice that fear—especially when our society forces children to face that fear
daily. I hope this play shows that trauma isn’t a contest. No one deserves their valid feelings to be
dismissed just because other bad things are happening other places.
How do you navigate telling a story rooted in trauma while still focusing on friendship,
identity and connection?
Well, that’s the whole thing about trauma, right? It feels so huge and all-encompassing, we can
really only process it one day at a time, one relationship at a time. Ironically, I feel like the play can
explore so many angles of mass shootings because the piece is such a small container. Just two
friends in one room, yapping about guns (and Pop-Tarts).
What role does humour play in helping audiences engage with subjects that are often
avoided in public conversation?
Comedy is like those doofy glasses people wear to watch a solar eclipse. Just as it would
obviously hurt to stare directly at the sun, it hurts to stare directly at the gnarliest parts of humanity.
But with the proper framing, we can handle looking—and we must, if we ever want to make
progress in this whacko world.
There’s a prominent belief that people in the US don’t want to talk about mass shootings. But
through my years of research and community work, I’ve found many people are actually desperate
to talk about mass shootings—we just have no idea how. It seems ass-backwards, but laughing
about the issue somehow opens a tiny bit of space to start talking about the issue, and then,
hopefully, that leads to actually solving the issue.
What do you hope audiences understand differently about how young people experience
fear, media attention and survival?
We often forget that as we get older, the world our youth sees is the only world they know. Adults can
say “things shouldn’t be this way” or “things didn’t used to be this way,” but it’s cheap lip service
because things for our modern young people are this way. And what we don’t visibly resist, our
youth internalizes as “normal.”
Americans are dangerously numb to mass shootings, so most folks don’t even express sadness or
outrage about them anymore. I think a lot of adults feel their fear and anger about our gun
epidemic is implied, but to our youth, adults’ lack of response reads as acceptance. Boomers
seemed to really promote the ideal that silence is strength, but Gen Z is showing us, silence
around gun violence just leads to apathy and dead children.
Anyway! Come see our comedy at Pleasance Baby Grand!