COLUMBINUS Raven Theatre
Look right through me, look right through
Are the best I’ve ever had —Gary Jules, “Mad
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But as Raven Theatre’s moving, sometimes frightening, brilliantly acted Columbinus makes clear, there was in fact a cruel logic behind Harris and Klebold’s scheme. The real target of the Columbine massacre wasn’t the people who died; it was the people who were left behind, terrorized and infuriated and anguished and isolated and confused by their own brush with death and the deaths of their friends and loved ones. “I’ll take you down the only road I’ve ever been down,” sings Richard Ashcroft in the Verve’s “Bitter Sweet Symphony,” a song that figures heavily in the production—and that’s exactly what Harris and Klebold did, sharing their pain by causing pain to the survivors.
Based on interviews and official documents as well as the diaries, e-mail correspondence, Internet posts, and homemade videos left behind by the shooters, Columbinus was written by Stephen Karam and P.J. Paparelli of the United States Theatre Project, a nonprofit collective that premiered the work in 2005 and presented it off-Broadway the following year. I never saw that production, but it’s hard to imagine it could have been any better than the current Chicago premiere staged by Greg Kolack. Employing choral speaking, monologues, and music as well as traditional dialogue, and making effective use of multimedia design by Mike Tutaj, the play glances over the sociological factors that Comprehending Columbine so clearly lays out. It doesn’t analyze the “jock-ocracy” of high school, where star athletes set the standard of coolness that other students must aim for lest they be derided as “losers.” Instead, Columbinus locates Harris and Klebold’s pathology in identity crises familiar to every adolescent, current and former.
Kelly Dailey’s set is a spare, simple platform for the subtly textured performances: a bare stage dominated by an oversize blackboard with the word “Columbinus” scrawled in chalk. Images are projected onto the blackboard: the boys’ jittery text messages, copies of reports from their counseling sessions (“He makes me laugh,” says one case file about Dylan), Nazi military footage, photos of the real Eric and Dylan, and—in a somber moment at the end of the play—the names and images of the 13 people killed at Columbine.
