Among the many remarkable qualities shown by the students advocating gun control after surviving the recent school shooting in Parkland, Florida is their discretion regarding the troubled young man alleged to have killed 17 of their classmates and coaches. Where President Trump and NRA representatives have used terms like “monster” and “evil” to cast Nikolas Cruz as a diabolical aberration, the March For Our Lives movement stresses what’s become unavoidably clear in recent decades: that people with the capacity for unthinkable violence and destruction exist everywhere, but only in this country have massacres like the one at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School grown so common that they no longer shock us.
Alex Lubischer’s fearless and mesmerizing new play, Bobbie Clearly, asks us to go one step further, and consider the struggle, or at least the humanity, of a person who would commit such a heinous act. We are introduced to the titular shooter, and his home town of Milton, Nebraska—identified in Lubischer’s stage directions as “technically, not even a town: a village,” with a population under 1,000—by middle-aged police officer Darla London, who came to know Bobbie as a volunteer preparing Catholic students for their first communion.
Darla, who emerges in Orange Is The New Black co-star Constance Shulman’s stoic but hauntingly nuanced performance as the play’s primary narrative guide and its pulsing conscience, recalls Bobbie tormenting another boy, Eddie, in the second grade. Seven years later, we soon learn, Bobbie murdered Eddie’s sister, Casey, in a cornfield.
Bobbie Clearly then unfolds in a series of interviews and public events—the first taking place two years after the incident, to gather footage for a documentary, the next occurring eight years later, on the tenth anniversary. “The characters are always aware of the audience and speak to the audience,” Lubischer’s directions tell us. “They know they are being documented. There are no private moments.” Working in Roundabout Theatre Company’s cozy Black Box Theatre for this New York premiere, director Will Davis emphasizes the uncomfortable intimacy, sometimes having actors appear directly behind audience members in the back rows.
In revealing these characters at their most self-conscious and aspirational, the playwright initially flirts with mocking clichés about small-town folk. Casey’s dad, a passionate hunter played by an appropriately gruff Christopher Innvar, recalls how his late daughter “screamed out, ‘Yahoo!’ when she got her first buck.” Her mom, who has a squeaky-clean persona and a wandering eye (both keenly conveyed by Crystal Finn), prefers to remember Casey for her talent and ambition as an actress, but in doing so mistakes the starring role in Cabaret for one in Rent. “I always get those two mixed up,” she says apologetically. “Both so racy.”
But as the play progresses, Lubischer, who is in fact from Nebraska, makes his townspeople increasingly difficult to pigeonhole. The perky co-captains of the dance team in the class above Casey’s, Megan and Meghan—imbued with teen spirit and narcissism by, respectively, Talene Monahon and Sasha Diamond—perform a goofy tribute at the first talent show memorializing Casey. But eight years later, after helping Megan (the bigger narcissist) write an obviously self-promoting tribute to their late friend, Meghan is more ambivalent about clinging to the past.
By this point, Bobbie, who was only 14 when he killed Casey, has been released from the juvenile facility he was assigned to then, and is back in Milton, hoping to redeem himself, or at least earn a level of acceptance. Darla, who has remained in touch, is sympathetic; Bobbie also finds a more self-serving ally, in his smug former “big brother” Derek, whose thirst for attention—made creepily convincing by JD Taylor—surpasses even Megan’s, and who seems rather too intent on confirming his heterosexuality.
We know that the now 24-year-old, socially stunted Bobbie (Ethan Dubin, at once heartbreaking and chillingly elusive) will fail, particularly after he makes the spectacularly impractical, and perhaps selfish, decision to perform in the tenth-anniversary benefit for a foundation in Casey’s name. A former classmate, tellingly named Pete (Gabriel Brown, a gentle giant), argues, “Isn’t that what—what Jesus—?”
The question is neither completed nor answered, and Bobbie Clearly proceeds to its heart-stopping climactic scene, in which Eddie—now tall, handsome, and deeply conflicted, in Tyler Lea’s moving performance—faces his old tormentor, and his and the community’s capacity for forgiveness is wrenchingly challenged.
“Life is impossible for some people,” Darla declares, near the end. “And why is that?” It’s a question we should probably consider more often than we do.
Bobbie Clearly opened April 3, 2018, at the Black Box Theatre and runs through May 6. Tickets and information: roundabouttheatre.org
