Annabelle Gurwitz and Students (Photo: Hunter Canning)

Room 1214

by Carol Rocamora

Playwright Michelle Kholos Brooks has imagined the unimaginable - the return of a teacher to her classroom at Marjorie Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, six years after the horrific mass shooting on February 14, 2018, when the gunman entered her classroom and killed two of her students, and one hour before the school building where she taught was to be torn down. 

Lily Friedman, the narrator of Room 1214, Brooks's devastating, deeply moving new play, is based on a Parkland history teacher whom Brooks interviewed. Friedman (played by the passionate Annabelle Gurwitch) revisits her classroom, where the play takes place, strewn with overturned desks and marred with bullet marks (set by Daniel Allen, lighting by Elaine Wong.) At the time of the shooting, she was teaching a Holocaust History class to a group of dedicated students. "We studied all kinds of hate in that class," she said, with retrospective irony. Now, she imagines that five of her students - two of whom were killed during the shooting - have returned with her. The purpose: try to understand just what happened "in that 6 minutes and 20 seconds of hell." 

The class that Ms. Friedman conducts in this imaginary eighty-minute reunion is periodically interrupted by warnings over the loudspeaker announcing that the school building must be vacated in preparation for its destruction. "You have one hour to exit the 1200 Building.. forty-five minutes to exit.. thirty minutes to exit," etc. declares the threatening voice, as the students relive the tragedy. "This classroom was my happy place.There was a lot of love in that room," Ms. Friedman explains to us in direct audience addresses, declaring that she refuses to leave until they've fully understood what happened.

Annabelle Gurwitch and Class (Photo: Hunter Canning)

During the "class," we in the audience become students, too, thanks to Brooks's meticulously researched script. We learn that twelve children die from gun violence every day in the United States. We learn that the 1200 building of the Parkland School complex, where the tragedy took place, was built ten years after Columbine - with no closets that could serve as hiding places. We learn that the Parkland shooter - a nineteen-year-old who graduated from that same school only a year before -- wore boots with swastika etchings, and that his biological mother may have been Jewish (yet another irony). We learn that there was never an active shooter drill at Parkland before the tragedy that left seventeen students dead and seventeen wounded. We learn details about AR-15s, their backgrounds, and their widespread usage in schools, movie theatres, bowling alleys, parades, amusement parks, churches, mosques, and synagogues in our country.

In contrast we also learn that - after a mass shooting at a school in Scotland in 1996 - the British Parliament banned private ownership of handguns throughout the UK. We learn that there has only been one mass shooting in each of the following countries: Australia, New Zealand, Spain, India, Lebanon, Yemen, and others. The cumulative effect of this knowledge is devastating.

Ben Hirschhorn, Andrea Negrete (Photo: Hunter Canning)

"Let's haunt them," declare Nate and Hannah, the two students who were killed in the shooting (played by Ben Hirschhorn and Andrea Negrete, giving unforgettable performances). "Boo"!  they whisper hoarsely, as they step off the stage and into the audience in one of the play's most chilling moments. Their classmate Ellie (Thyme Briscoe), B (Kleo Mitrokostas), and G (Alessandro Yokoyama) complete the cast of gifted young actors, directed with skill and sensitivity by Sarah Norris.

Room 1214 poses numerous questions. "What could I have done differently, to prevent this?" Ms. Friedman asks repeatedly. But Brooks is a playwright with a mission, as she explains in her program notes. So there are answers, too. "Why don't people listen"? Answer: "Because they love their guns." "You can never rewrite history," Ms. Friedman realizes.

Above all, the play offers lasting lessons, including: "Pain should not be wasted. Use it for good."

And finally, Ms. Friedman reads a message from Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel that concludes this powerful, deeply impacting new play: "For the dead and the living, we must bear witness. For not only are we responsible for the memories of the dead, we are also responsible for what we are doing with those memories."

As for the students of Room 1214, and others whose images flash on the classroom walls (projections by Janet Bentley and Andy Evan), we hear Nate and Hannah's haunting, parting words: "Don't forget about us, please."

Room 1214

At 59e59 Theaters, 59 East 59^th St.

Running time: 1 hour 20 minutes

For more information, visit https://www.59e59.org/shows/show-detail/room-1214/

Through December 8