“He came out in a torrent”, “ Emily Kaczmarek said about the first 2018 draft of her play Gentle target. “Sometimes the games seem to me like that – like a primary cry that I just had to go out.”
At the beginning of 2018, the United States was shaken by the Lycée massacre in Parkland, Florida, during what would become, at the time, the worst year for the country's school fire. An educator herself, Kaczmarek remembers having trouble enduring the news, haunted by what the survivors of the shooting lived. She knew she needed to write about it, but was wary of creating something that appeared as a preacher or fodder for a special after school.
Instead, she created Gentle targetnow ready for its world premiere to Detroit public theater (April 30 to June 8). In the play, Kaczmarek explores the impact of armed violence on childhood from Amanda's point of view, a 9 -year -old girl, and her toys and property: a prison penguin, an American doll, a diary, and more. Kaczmarek said that she had been inspired by a profile of a young school that survived a school, surprised to see how an intelligent and imaginative child treated such a horror.
Hoping to represent such a child and “give him power in the context of history – in the real world, children are so at the mercy of adults”, Kaczmarek said that she wondered: “How can I center a child and who other can be in history so that we reversed the dynamics of power?
This is how she had the idea of including Amanda's toys, whose whole existence is dedicated to a little girl, and can therefore say when there is something different about her: she is angry, she is violent, and they do not know why.
“I think that the vanity of the use of toys has also enabled space for humor,” said Kaczmarek, “for a world that can attract people and then, if necessary, the intestine.”
Jerald Raymond Pierce is the editor -in -chief of American theater.
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