Theater review by Stuart Miller…
A play examining the horrific toll wrought by America’s cavalier obsession with guns is a worthy idea. But Michelle Kholos Brooks’ docu-drama “Room 1214,” set in a classroom where two teens died during the 2018 Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School massacre is too didactic and perhaps too focused on being worthy, to truly challenge our minds or reach into our hearts.
Kholos Brooks interviewed the history teacher, Ivy Schamis, whose Holocaust elective was shattered by the shooting. In the play, the teacher, Ms. Friedman returns to the classroom for the first time in six years to collect her belongings and reminisce before the building is demolished. She talks directly to the audience about her experience while also imagining a reuniion with several students– including two who died in the shooting. She talks about America and gun violence and the hate that fuels school shootings, drawing connections between these tragedies and the Holocaust, although she often stretches that tie too thin.
Still, the play opens promisingly with an early flashback to when a student, Nate, came in to charm Ms. Friedman into giving him an extension on a paper since he had to step into the lead in the school musical. This ebullient and promising youngster is one of the students she watched die on the classroom floor that Valentine’s Day and the contrast is heart wrenching.
Friedman then tells us about the maps in her classroom, including one that traced hurricane routes, a must for Floridians. “If you can’t trace the path of destruction… you can’t brace for the storm,” she says, before noting how many signs there were that the shooter was heading for danger, “neon signs” toward a “hellish path to destruction” that were ignored.
But Friedman and the play begin meandering. She explains her Holocaust elective class’s popularity in part by saying, “It was very accepting in here, don’t you think,” to which one former student, Ellie, responds, “Everyone was nice in this class.”
A subsequent scene of two students working on a project in the class feels irrelevant and falls flat as does the part where she roots through her old pocketbook and shows us her old car keys and wallet. And while Friedman’s anger over the way the school’s construction made it easier to shoot and harder to hide and over the fact that the school didn’t do active shooter drills until after the slaughter is justified, it is dramatically inert and thematically irrelevant. (The play is arguing, rightfully, for reducing shootings, not for ways to minimize the damage of each one.)
There are some strong moments throughout, including a debate about how to think about the shooter who was just 19 himself or the idea that the school administrators never checked in on Friedman’s emotional health after most likely due to their own fears, but often they flit by while a seven-minute scene in which Friedman teaches her class the history of guns (from Samuel Colt to the AR-15) belabors its points.
And while it’s nice to hear the bad guys called out by name– the crisis actor and false flag nonsense perpetuated by the far right is due to “Con men like Alex Jones scare the crap out of people and then sell them bogus supplements and tactical gear to keep them safe”– moments like this, or ones that take Ron DeSantis or Marco Rubio or the NRA to task are too easy.
It’s the same when Ms. Friedman rattles off all the other countries in the world that have gun laws and few to no mass shootings. That’s a gut punch for the high school students to learn but is it really news? An audience of well-informed (mostly older) liberal New Yorkers knows who is to blame and why, so making us feel good by pointing the finger at them doesn’t really accomplish much.
Annabelle Gurwitch is only intermittently successful as Ms. Friedman; she captures the over-the-top enthusiasm for her students that fuels so many of the best teachers, but struggled occasionally with lines and as a result sometimes seemed to be reciting dialogue more than inhabiting a character. Most of the students are fine albeit a bit tentative in their roles; the exception is Ben Hirschhorn as Nate. Hirschhorn is loaded with charisma and charm but he also can find the outrage, as he does in a diatribe while discussing the shooter and the death penalty.
“Let me get this straight. Because adults, grown people who were lucky enough to survive their time in school…because they don’t have the ability to make decent gun laws, because they don’t bother to follow the breadcrumbs, because they’re so madly, passionately in love with their assault rifles, I’m in the position of wishing another kid dead? I’m rooting for another kid to get killed for killing me?”
Kholos Brooks’ best known play, “Hitler’s Tasters,” was also about a tricky topic– it tells the story of loyal girls who were used by the Fuhrer to make sure his food wasn’t poisoned. The play was sharp-edged and irreverent (throwing in anachronistic touches to remind us how girls are endangered today by men with power) but it also lived and breathed with fully drawn characters, so the themes emerged through them and the narrative. This time around the play is stating its points directly and repeatedly.
“Room 1214” has plenty to teach students and members of Congress but for the rest of us fewer speeches and more specifics of the students and their lives in (and out of ) that classroom would have underscored the tragedy in a more dramatic way. That would truly have kept those poor dead children alive in our hearts.
“Room 1214” is playing at 59E59th Street through December 8th. It runs 80 minutes with no intermission.
Photos by Hunter Canning.
