Conflicting Tales Of A School Shooting In 'The Library'
The Library, a new play at New York's Public Theater, tackles an uncomfortable contemporary topic head on: it looks at the aftermath of a school shooting and peers into the shattered lives of the survivors, and the stories they tell. The play is written by Scott Z. Burns and directed by Steven Soderbergh, who've collaborated on three films; most recently, the thriller, Side Effects.
And even before the play begins, Soderbergh and Burns make the audience uneasy. When you enter the theater, a young woman in a hospital gown lies center stage on what could be a table or a bed or a slab in the morgue, Burns says. "People start having to invent a story, you know, which is: is she alive? Is she not alive? And so they're already, before we've said anything, experiencing what the play is about, which is, you know, you start assembling facts and truths into stories that support your belief set and allow you to keep going."
Once the play starts, the audience discovers that the young woman onstage is a high school sophomore named Caitlin Gabriel, and, although she's survived a violent massacre, one of the other survivors has gone on TV and accused her of telling the gunman where several victims were hiding. 17-year-old film actress Chle Grace Moretz is making her stage debut as Caitlin. "Caitlin ... wakes up out of her induced coma, basically, and she finds out right then and there that not only is her best friend that she was laying beside dead, but that she's now being accused of being an accomplice to the murder of six children and one faculty member," Moretz says.
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