Bang Bang You're Dead (play)

Bang Bang You're Dead
Written by	William Mastrosimone
Date premiered	April 7, 1999
Original language	English
Subject	School violence

Bang Bang You're Dead is a one-act play written by William Mastrosimone, with the assistance of the Spanish River Drama Department (Boca Raton, Florida) in 1999 to raise awareness of school violence and its causes. According to Mastrosimone, it “is a drama to be performed by kids, for kids” for free. The plot focuses on Josh, a high school student who murders his parents and five classmates. It is strongly based on the events surrounding Kip Kinkel's shootings of his parents on May 20, 1998, and 27 of his classmates at Thurston High School in Springfield, Oregon on May 21, 1998. As of October 2002, three years after its publication, the play had been performed over 15,000 times.

William Mastrosimone intended Bang, Bang, You're Dead to be easily accessed and performed by teens “in any modest playing area," and therefore production requires “no set, no lights, no costumes (except for contemporary dress)." Its purpose is to raise awareness of the roots of school violence, which, as Mastrosimone writes in his notes on the play, are not always easily seen. Mastrosimone hopes that the play will help people “see tragedy before it happens." Mastrosimone stresses the importance of young people seeing the play performed by their peers, and therefore he does not allow the play to be on film or video. Mastrosimone hopes to reach out to potential killers in the thousands of audiences that the play continues to gather.

Bang, Bang, You're Dead! was written in the wake of three school shootings: Thurston High School (Springfield, Oregon) on May 21, 1998, Heath High School (Paducah, Kentucky) on December 4, 1997, and Westside Middle School (Jonesboro, Arkansas) on March 24, 1998. The names of the cities in which these shootings took place are echoed multiple times within the script.

The tragedy most significant to the play was the shooting at Thurston High School. The play, based strongly on the events that surrounded this particular school shooting, premiered at Thurston. It was performed by Thurston students, some of whom had been wounded in the shooting by Kip Kinkel.

Mastrosimone wrote the first draft while troubled by a recent event at his son's school, in which an anonymous classmate of his son wrote a message on a chalkboard, threatening to kill his classmates and his teacher.

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