Columbinus

columbinus is a play written by Stephen Karam and PJ Paparelli, with contributions by Josh Barrett, Sean McNall, Karl Miller, Michael Milligan and Will Rogers, created by the United States Theatre Project. The play looks at issues of alienation, hostility and social pressure in high schools and was suggested by the April 1999 massacre at Columbine High School in Jefferson County, Colorado. The play premiered in Silver Spring, Maryland in 2005 and then Off-Broadway in 2006.

columbinus includes excerpts from discussions with parents, survivors and community leaders in Littleton as well as diaries and home video footage to reveal what it refers to as "the dark recesses of American adolescence".

The first act of the play is set in a stereotypical, fictional American high school and follows the lives and struggles of eight teenage archetypes. These characters are not given names but labels, and the two outcast friends designated in the script as "Freak" and "Loner" are slowly driven to crime and madness by the bullying from their classmates. In the first scene of act two, these boys become Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold when the actors playing Freak and Loner, respectively, approach two tables with objects relating to the massacre and change into replicas of the clothing the perpetrators wore; the perpetrators' senior photos are projected on a screen behind them. The scenes following this are taken from the perpetrators' videos and personal journals, illustrating the days approaching and including the shootings and the suspects' suicides. The newly added act three has the other cast members become survivors and townspeople who reflect on the events, including the cover up of information surrounding the suspects. The play briefly touches on modern shootings such as the incidents at Aurora or Newtown. A few productions have included a brief scene discussing the story of the Columbine survivor who wrote to Mike Judge about "Wings of the Dope," an episode of King of the Hill which she credited with enabling her to grieve a boy she never got to tell she loved, who turned out to be one of the perpetrators (resulting in her being pressured to repress her grief).

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