Their Bloody Valentine

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The New York Sun

It’s not easy being a jock. Or a cheerleader. Or Dylan Klebold. This odd leveling of the adolescent playing field sits uncomfortably at the center of “Columbinus,” the United States Theater Project’s fluidly staged but unenlightening gloss on the events during, after, and especially before April 20, 1999. That’s when Klebold and Eric Harris, two students at Columbine High School, murdered 12 students and a teacher before shooting themselves. Authors P.J. Paparelli (who also directed) and Stephen Karam have employed an ensemble-oral-history approach similar to that used by the Tectonic Theater Project (“The Laramie Project,” “Gross Indecency”). But while much of “Columbinus” has reportedly been compiled from extensive interviews, the text feels more like the result of a focus group – with an unfortunate emphasis on the most generic, least revealing quotes.

Klebold (a compelling Will Rogers) and Harris (Karl Miller) gradually inch their way into the spotlight, with much of Act 2 given over to the day of the attack. But “Columbinus” begins by focusing on the universal experiences of teenagers, the cigarette puffs and wardrobe crises and feelings of inadequacy that plagued not just the eventual killers but also their classmates.

Every kid gets his or her day in the sun – or in the shade, rather, as these scenes are largely devoted to lamenting the woes of the preps, the athletes, the cheerleaders, the drama nerds, and the brainiacs as well as the misfits. This sort of thing was pretty tired as far back as “The Breakfast Club,”and it hasn’t gotten any fresher since. The free-form teeth-gnashing hits a low point in the Act 1 finale, which manages to fit bulimia, cutting, sexual confusion, and teen pregnancy into one montage.

These cliches come at a fast clip: Mr. Paparelli maneuvers his eight performers around the New York Theatre Workshop stage with clinical precision. But the constant movement feels increasingly like an attempt to mask the fact that nothing terribly new is happening. In trying to depict Klebold and Harris as fundamentally “just like us,” the authors (along with dramaturge Patricia Hersch) have created a stage full of characters just like everybody else – except with all the exciting, challenging, differentiating edges carved away.

What little energy is generated by this earlier material comes from the knowledge that two of these characters will eventually put on trench coats, arm themselves to the teeth, and murder a dozen of their peers in cold blood, leaving what Harris describes as “a scar on America that will never heal.” (He gets his wish: In an epilogue, one character says seven years after the shooting that “this community is permanently wounded.”) But the other six characters are archetypes, not actual students, and so the audience is never allowed to make any real emotional connections to anyone but Klebold and Harris.

One early attempt at contextualization comes during a “history lesson” that tries to establish a throughline linking Cain and Abel, the 1920s “thrill killers” Leopold and Loeb, and the Hitler Youth to the present day. The writing quickly gets muddled in glib, tidy conclusions, but at least Messrs. Karam and Paparelli are trying to find an emotional logic in Columbine beyond “everybody hurts” platitudes.

The duo’s preparation and last-minute skittishness segues inexorably into the massacre itself, which begins with a replaying of teacher Patti Nielson’s 911 call (the same one featured in the Michael Moore documentary “Bowling for Columbine”). That teacher was calling from the school library, and two-thirds of the day’s fatalities came immediately thereafter, during the 13 minutes that Klebold and Harris spent in the library.

It is here that Mr. Paparelli’s direction is at its sharpest, rendering the chaos of the scene through a mosaic of first-person accounts while keeping the on-stage action fairly sedate. (The gunshots are depicted by Messrs. Miller and Rogers repeatedly punching the upstage black board, bolstered unnecessarily by booming gunshot sound effects.) What comes across strongest is not the students’ terror but the massacre’s completely arbitrary quality: For all of their talk of military precision, Klebold and Harris improvised wildly as they went, sparing some while killing others.

In the aftermath of this wrenching sequence, the narrative shifts over to the adults in the town, with surprising complexity. A priest describes a wreath of Beanie Babies placed around Klebold’s neck at his funeral, there is a conflict over whether to commemorate 13 or 15 deaths (i.e., whether to include the killers), the lingering mistrust – the authors suddenly move from the students’ fuzzy generalities to the painfully specific emotions that hover over Columbine to this day.

The only scene prior to the shooting that matches these snippets in intensity and insight comes when the archetypal Christian (an effective Nicole Lowrance) addresses God in a crisis of conscience over – what else? – the prom. “Maybe that’s why Your teenage years are such a mystery,” she wonders. “You didn’t want anyone to know.”

For all their videotaped tirades, some of which are re-enacted in “Columbinus,” Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris are just as unknowable by the end of this ambitious but stillborn work. So are their all-too-“typical” classmates. What’s worse, getting to know them just doesn’t seem worth the effort.

Until June 11 (79 E. 4th Street, between Second Avenue and Bowery, 212-239-6200).


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