A sorrowful drama in every way, This Flat Earth studies the emotional struggles of a 13-year-old girl in the wake of a school shooting that killed nine of her classmates.
Lindsey Ferrentino’s all-too-timely play begins a month after the slaughter, as Julie (Ella Kennedy Davis) reluctantly prepares to return to her school, slated to reopen that next day. Complications arise that prevent her attendance, not least of which is Julie’s horrified discovery that similar massacres have occurred at other schools.
“So why don’t the grown-ups just fix it?” she wonders. “Why would I go back to school if the problem isn’t fixed?”
The adults in the story are clueless. Julie’s widowed dad, Dan (Lucas Papaelias), is a blue-collar drudge at a utilities company. He’s a nice guy who obviously loves his only child, but “loser” subliminally hovers above Dan’s ponytailed head. The affluent Lisa (Cassie Beck), the mom of a slain student, redirects her grief through rigid activism at the school. Lisa, for all of her moist eyes and good intentions, becomes the unwitting agent of Julie’s fresh troubles. An elderly woman who lives upstairs, Cloris (Lynda Gravatt), a musician sidelined by infirmities, mostly listens in silence to her old recordings until she unexpectedly turns prophetic.
The play’s other character is Zander (Ian Saint-Germain), who hopes to be Julie’s boyfriend but settles for best buddy status. Zander, better adjusted than Julie to the tragedy, figures into a pathetic scheme that they hatch to get Julie back into the classroom. Zander gives voice to a generation who expect such horrors. Reminding Julie of the active shooter drills they did in school, Zander says, “We practice ’cause the adults knew it would eventually happen to us, too … this one was just our turn.”
Painful bits of rueful dialogue punctuate the 90-minute play, which does not completely achieve its intent to illuminate Julie’s complex reactions as a survivor. In a program note for this world premiere by Playwrights Horizons, Ferrentino says she was inspired by the anxieties she suffered as a 13-year-old in Florida during the 9/11 attacks. Yet Julie’s naïve character remains too vague to satisfy. It is challenging for a writer to bring an inarticulate adolescent into focus. It is equally hard for a juvenile actor to realize a hazy character. These weaknesses in composition and performance are compounded by Ferrentino’s sudden attempt late in the story to reframe Julie and the shooting into the perspective of an entire lifetime, which incongruently swaps the drama’s quasi-realistic tone for something mystical.
Still, there are felicitous touches to this latest play from the talented Ferrentino, whose charming Amy and the Orphans currently runs at Roundabout’s Laura Pels Theatre. Rebecca Taichman, the director of tricky works such as Indecent, enhances the story’s mournful nature with elegiacal cello music (Bach, performed by Christine H. Kim) and obtains from Beck a poignant depiction of a shattered mother. Softened by Christopher Akerlind’s tender lighting, designer Dane Laffrey’s stark, two-floor setting for the building where Dan and Julie reside is devoid of decoration to represent their bleak present.
There are no easy answers for the questions that arise in This Flat Earth. But as implied by its title, which refers to Julie’s class essay about Christopher Columbus and the ignorant beliefs of those times, the play quietly expresses a hope that school shootings may someday be a horror that exists only in the past.
This Flat Earth opened April 9, 2018, at Playwrights Horizons and runs through April 29. Tickets and information: playwrightshorizons.org
