Serious subject

Carol Gebert has made a habit recently of selecting serious shows for regional competition.

None of them, though, have hit as close to home as the piece her group will take on Saturday.

Jay County High School’s thespian troupe will perform “Bang Bang You’re Dead,” a one-act play that depicts a school shooting, in regional competition at Avon.

“I’ve just been so overwhelmed by school shootings,” said Gebert, who teaches theatre at JCHS. (The thespians will offer a free performance to the public at 7 p.m. Friday at the high school.) “Columbine really effected me as a teacher and a human. …”

Similar events, including the May 25, 2018, shooting at Noblesville West Middle School, have touched the thespians, she said.

“Our students talk a lot about their feelings,” Gebert added. “They’re very open. …

“And they also talk about their fears — that if it can happen in Noblesville, it can happen here.

“I just think it’s a play that helps my students get some of that feeling out.”

High school students depicting a high school shooting.

That’s just how the author intended it.

The show “is a drama to be performed by kids, for kids,” William Mastrosimone has said.

Mastrosimone wrote “Bang Bang You’re Dead” in the aftermath of a series of 1998 school shootings, basing it heavily on the one that occurred at Thurston High School in Springfield, Oregon. The play was first performed by Thurston students less than a year after the shootings and then made available for free.

For Jay County’s thespians, the regional competition piece follows their portrayal of other serious subjects — disabilities in Helen Keller’s story “The Miracle Worker” in 2017 and mental illness in “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” last year.

Kaleb Weaver takes on the challenge of playing Josh, the shooter who has killed his parents and four of his classmates.

“It’s obviously something that’s very sensitive,” said Weaver, adding that his goal is to portray Josh as a flawed human rather than a one-dimensional character who is pure evil. “I kind of wanted to capture that he was still a person. He doesn’t grasp the magnitude, the gravity of what he’s done until the very end.”

The show opens in Josh’s jail cell and tells the story in a series of flashbacks. They include conversations with his parents, struggles with voices — “Shadows” — that taunt him and confrontations with his victims who talk about what the things they miss and experiences they will never have because they were gunned down in high school.

“Shadow was originally one character that was kind of like the voice in the back of Josh’s head that was telling him to make all the bullies at school shut up and convinces Josh to kill them,” said junior Shyla Renner, who plays one of the Shadows along with McKenna Vore and Hannah Troyer.

“He’s listening to the voice that nobody should ever listen to,” added Vore, a sophomore.

The rest of the cast is made up of Megan Templeton, Logan Zimmerman, Lauren Pruett, Juste Griškonyte, Roscoe Phenis, Alex Batt, Nichol Kunkler, Leah Hummel, Alex Ardizzone and Alina Nikolaiets, with Raven Weaver handling behind-the-scenes technical work.

While the subject of the show connects with high school students on its own, the Jay County performers have taken it a step further.

Templeton, Zimmerman and Pruett, who play deceased students, use their own names and have rewritten monologues to fit their own lives and personalities.

“When we were doing a run-through and they started using each other’s names … you feel something that’s unexplainable,” said Vore,

It’s portraying that emotion that will be the key to success in Saturday’s competition, Gebert said.

“The acting has to be crisp, and it has to be sincere, it has to be honest,” she added. “And we have to honor not only the script but the people, the families that have been effected.”