The Burials

A new play by Caitlin Parrish

Or: Loaded Question

The daughter of an Illinois Congressman, Sophie Martin (Olivia Cygan) has her hands full as the youngest member of her dad’s “team,” a mother figure to her siblings Ben (Matt Farabee) and Chloe (Becca Savoy), and a general A-level student at Anderson High School. But when her brother becomes the latest in the long list of mass shooters and her father Ryan (Coburn Goss) takes extreme actions to preserve his reputation, Sophie faces the choice of standing by her or standing up for what she thinks is right.

Of all the plays I’ve encountered upon the issue of gun violence (and lord knows I’ve seen more than I wish) The Burials stands out as the most moving and effective. Normally such shows are hamstrung (like the media coverage) by the emphasis on the emotional rollings of the perpetrators or the survivors, which is gripping and pathos ridden and accomplishes JACK SQUAT for telling us a story that will teach us how prevent such things from happening. The best I had seen prior to this evening was Joshua Rollins Concealed Carry, which traced the culture of toxic masculinity what might turn a survivor into a monster of their own right, but Parrish plucks the bloody crown from it by turning to the common denominator in all these tragedies: the tools that were designed to kill as many people as possible in as short amount of time.

Not to say that the Burials is quite polished to a marble shine. From the beginning Parrish puts a lot of balls in the air and it takes her a third of the play to get in a comfortable throwing rhythm. But every scene contains a surprise, some cold coin that lands on the growing pile in our stomachs, or blazes in our eye as the world moves, a tiny toe-step, for the better. Like her root-story Antigone, Parrish hits home hardest when the political becomes the personal and the personal becomes political. Her long time director Erica Weiss carefully pitches those coins across Courtney O’Neill’s greek amphitheater (cleverly disguised as a high school hallway) and in between Matt Chapman digital war drum sound design while weaving detailed, authentic instances of love and violence (both physical and spiritual). Though sometimes the play’s social media element (played out on screens across the stage) is overwhelming and hard to track (it is very difficult to discern anything in Ben’s video diary), there are times when it’s use its thrillingly effective.

Where Parrish’s writing swings really clicks is creating real kids, and she is fortunately gifted in a cluster of skilled artists to give life to her words. Joel Boyd, playing Jayden the beau of Sophie’s best friend Jannette (Stephanie Andrea Barron) and Sophie’s rival for her affection, earnestly challenges our heroine to take a nighter road while pointing out that many people, Jannette included, live under the threat of random gun violence everyday, and that the world views people like him with more suspicion then ben would have ever received. Kristina Valada-Viars, pulling double duty as both as Sophie’s teacher Mrs. Souder cable news host Zoe Lukas, mixes together heartwringingly inarticulate concern for her kids in the wake of the murders with a gentle but knife-tonged demeanor of a media Medea who maneuvers both Sophie and Ryan, as their political goals split, into answering impossible questions. As the youngest Martin, Savoy holds most the plays jokes and spins them with expert timing and deadpan teenage weariness.

Cygan goes hand in glove with her playwright, both working together to create, not a paragon, but an exceptional young woman stretched the the breaking point with heartsickness, shedding her ignorance, tormented by self-recrimination, and standing in front of the train of public opinion. Sophie wears so many hats: her father’s confidant and junior staffer, a high school girl, an archivist of the memory of those who died, her brother’s sole keeper; so it is tour de force to watch her actress to switch between them with such smoothness and speed. Cygan unpeels the upright, ice-slick politicians daughter to the student trying to steer her friends and family, to the enraged and grief-stricken creature lashing out at the world, and then zips her identities up again, each one altered by everything we see she carries beneath. But most of all she IS a teenager, struggling for her place in the world with all the hurt and hope natural, and so powerful, in that time of life.

Despite the time we spend with Ben, and his families anguish over how they could have prevented him, the essence of The Burials does not dwell upon him, his victims, or even those he left behind. The storyteller Syd Lieberman put it, “Everyone was somebody’s baby, everyone was somebody’s jump for joy.” But that does not excuse a monstrous action, anymore than a constitutionally preserved privilege gives us the right to let so many guns fall so easily into so many hands. “There will always be more Ben’s” as Sophie puts it, “There are hundreds of why’s to what he did, but only one how.”