Playwright: Andrew Hinderaker. At: Stage Left Theatre at Theater Wit, 1229 W. Belmont. Phone: 773-883-8830; $22. Runs through: Nov. 21
American teenagers are legally permitted to operate firearms in a variety of situationsmilitary service, law enforcement, target shooting, hunting expeditionswithout hazards any greater than those arising from caustic household substances in homes with children. The factor making for accident prevention in both instances is the seriousness with which all involved approach the proximal potential for injury and the extent of their education in precautionary measures designed to reduce occurrence of mishaps.
Andrew Hinderaker either has never considered this, or he doesn't trust us to have considered it. Or perhaps his goal was simply to write a cheap-and-weepy thriller. Whatever the answer, his play's provocative, if restrictive, premise could have made for discussion based in fair and rational argument, but winds upwell, shooting itself in the foot.
Our locale is a town where, following a Columbine-style massacre, high school students are permitted to carry guns for self-defense. Middle-school bullying victims Justin and Michael are first seen at an arcade claw-crane machine that dispenses automatic pistols ( one size fits all, doncha know? ) . The grownups are equally comic-book: Justin's widowed history-teacher father, James, is guilty over the death of his wife in the aforementioned classroom bloodbath ( she was substituting for him on that fatal day, you see ) . Fatherless young Michael, however, finds his male guidance in Wayne, the arms instructor at the local community center. "These are not toys," this mentor exhorts his pupils, "and this is not a game"but then he proposes a game, stagingare you ready for this?a fake homicide in order to impress the righteousness of his ideological stance on an ambivalent Justin.
And from that moment forward, there's nowhere the plot can go but into stupid, soapy melodrama. A female colleague may be on hand to acquaint us with research on the gender indoctrination leading to chromosomal aggressionoh, and to freely vent the emotion that the men try unsuccessfully to hide. But despite poker-faced commitment on the part of director Vance Smith and his cast, by the time the increasingly fuzzy motivational threads reach their inevitable conclusion, any suspense generated by insecure youngsters fulfilling remorseless fantasies of power through ballistics has been undermined beyond credulity by the adults who serve as their models behaving like immature adolescents. When did numbskullsof any ageever need guns to be destructive?