By By JOHN EBY / Dowagiac Daily News
Senior Keera Morton was in sixth grade when Columbine happened.
She and other Union High School drama class actors rehearsing Thursday for next week's free presentations of "Bang Bang You're Dead" see DUHS in the material.
Students said attention the district has given to bullying helps create awareness of the problem.
Drama class students will present the free play three times to the public - Monday, March 28; Wednesday, March 30; and Thursday, March 31, all at 7 p.m. at Beckwith Theatre, and to Central Middle School Thursday morning. Performances skip Tuesday so as to not conflict with the DUHS band concert.
As high-school theater productions go, "Bang Bang You're Dead" packs an emotional wallop because of its raw emotion and ripped-from-the-headlines feel. Their timing needs to be rat-a-tat-tat perfect. There's not much here to carry the show except its somber message.
The stark set at the Beckwith consists of a versatile black box which serves as judge's bench, coffin and the cot in Josh's cell the night after the shootings, when a cold realization settles over him that this wasn't a video game and he cannot set everything right by hitting the reset button.
In fact, Josh sentenced himself to a living hell he cannot escape because his victims are not taking their gunshot wounds lying down.
As dead students turn directly to the audience and ruminate about little things they miss, like the look on a boy's face when he's about to ask for a date and instead borrows a math book, to sneezing, sleeping or soaking in a pool on a hot day, the effect is mesmerizing.
Breathing stops in the theater from the impact.
William Mastrosimone, creator of "Extremities," wrote the 40-minute play on school violence in response to the May 21, 1998, shooting spree at Thurston High in Springfield, Ore., where 1999 Dogwood Fine Arts Festival author the late Ken Kesey lived.
Mastrosimone placed "Bang Bang You're Dead" on the Internet so it could be downloaded for free as a "resource for dealing with a broken world that's violent, unhealthy, unfair and beyond the power of anyone to fix except today's generation" if there are to be no more Springfields, Paducahs, Jonesboros, Littletons, or now, Red Lake, Minn.
Jeff Weise killed nine people and wounded seven March 21 before trading gunfire with a police officer and apparently shooting himself.
His motive isn't clear, but the FBI said the shootings on a northern Minnesota Indian reservation appear to have been planned.
Weise gunned down his grandfather, 58, and donned the tribal officer's bulletproof vest to drive his marked squad car to the high school, where he began shooting classmates at will.
The 17-year-old, whose father committed suicide four years ago and whose mother is in a nursing home with head injuries from an auto accident, created "sick" comic books with drawings of people shooting each other and wrote stories about zombies. He dressed in black, wore eyeliner, a long, black trench coat and combat boots, admired Hitler and referred to himself as the "Angel of Death" in German.
The teased student was quiet in school, but he became outgoing writing on neo-Nazi Web sites. In one posting, he criticized interracial relationships on the reservation and ripped fellow Indian teens for listening to rap music. "We have kids my age killing each other over things as simple as a fight, and it's because of the rap influence," he wrote.
His rampage with two pistols and a shotgun resulted in the nation's bloodiest school shooting since Columbine High School in Littleton, Colo., six years ago.
Warning signs abounded. About a month ago, Weise's sketch of a skeleton strumming a guitar, captioned "March to the death song 'til your boots fill with blood," was displayed in his English class.
Mastrosimone, of Seattle, established the Web site in association with Ribbon of Promise, a non-profit organization formed in Springfield and dedicated to ending school violence.
He charges no royalties for any productions of the play, so no admission is charged.
While the play has been presented thousands of times across the country, Dowagiac's December 1999 production was not only its area debut, but perhaps the first in the Midwest.
While the title itself causes some to criticize it for glorifying violence without actually seeing the play, "Bang Bang You're Dead" focuses mostly on the lasting consequences of an impulsive, desperate act by the shooter and the finality of it for his targets, as well as their families, friends, schools and communities who are rocked by the ripples downstream.
Parents may squirm at the troubled boy's masterful manipulation of them, promising straight A's if he can have the hunting rifle he covets so he can pursue a rite of passage to manhood with his grandfather.
Ultimately, Josh feels cold-blooded killing is the only way he can command anyone to heed his cries for help.
The production also indicts violent movies and video games that numb teen-agers and train them to amuse themselves by killing.
As "Josh the Joke's" pressures pile up - expulsion, summer school, seeing a shrink - he feels his life is over. He craves the feeling of instant respect his gun buys him as he tries to "kill the voices" and block out the inadequacy oozing from his pores and smothering him.
Mastrosimone began writing the day after Springfield when his 15-year-old son came home from high school in Enumclaw, Wash., describing a message written on a blackboard that everyone in class and the teacher, too, would die.
The culprit called it a joke, but the playwright says, "I, like every other parent, was shaken to my core because we understood that our kids are no longer safe anywhere."
The plays offers no answers except to realize that a potential killer can inhabit any school if troubled students are teased and taunted until they snap.
He uses the actors as a sort of bomb squad in hopes of defusing such situations through exposure and recognition.