Room 1214 – 17 November 2024

Straddling the line between fact and fiction, Room 1214 tells the story of Lily (Annabelle Gurwitch), a teacher who lost students in the 2018 mass shooting at Marjorie Stoneman Douglas High School. In the play, Lily explores the wreckage of her classroom and interacts with former students, victims and survivors, in search of what she could have taught them that might have been useful in keeping them alive. The playwright imagines these students to be as alert, attentive, and engaged as possible, dutifully taking in Lily’s imagined lessons on everything from how mass atrocities have taken place in history to the mechanics of gun manufacturing and why an AR-15 is not useful for self defense or hunting. Particularly chilling, she teaches students that stricter gun laws have almost entirely prevented student deaths in countries willing to make and enforce those laws. In a confetti-filled climax, Lily absurdly imagines that paper hearts and love could have stopped the shooter, then acknowledges her absurdity.

Room 1214 is littered with pearls of wisdom that collectively paint an unambiguous picture of our flawed system—the flaws in how we think, what we teach, and the lack of importance placed on how influential educators really are. A particularly powerful moment that stuck out to me was when the dead classmates, Nate (Ben Hirschhorn) and Hannah (Andrea Negrete) grappled with the idea of the shooter being sentenced to life in prison versus death over questions of mental competence. Nate’s touching conclusion that another kid dying as retribution wouldn’t help much contrasted Hannah’s feeling that she wanted the shooter who stole her life to pay for it. Gurwitch’s nuanced performance suggested a slight nod toward Nate here, but bore the mark of a true educator who encourages debate and can hold space for opinions she doesn’t agree with that are rooted in logic, reason, and somebody’s truth. Educators like that are all too rare these days. Many want to teach what they feel is right when it comes to political sore spots.

The use of projections (The Roly Polys, Janet Bentley, Andy Evan Cohen) had moments that were poignant and moments that were farcical, both of which were, for the most part, well placed and well executed. There was a deeply powerful moment in which one of the living students, Ellie (Thyme Briscoe) exposed the other two living students, B (Kleo Mitrokostas) and G (Alessandro Yokoyama), as having not contributed to the conversation. Both ran to the whiteboard to explain in writing that they were silenced because they were young, poor, and powerless to stop gun violence. This turned the tide in the show from a simple “never forget” to a discussion that saw remembering as a conscious act requiring haunting and reminding, not merely the absence of the ability to block out the past.

Conceptually, there was really only one concept in this show that felt poorly integrated, which was repeatedly bringing up various colored lights on the audience at times when we were meant to be learning something. Though necessary in moments where the actors entered the audience, usage in other moments pulled focus from the action on stage. I was philosophically hopeful that this lighting concept was going to segue into Lily ending with a lesson for us that included some kind of action that could be taken to end our journey from never forgetting to remembering to preventing gun violence. Instead, we got the hard reality that love is never enough.

Taken as a whole, Room 1214 was an imagining of going back that was a meaningful, touching tribute to the victims in Parkland, and pulled at the heartstrings of audience members who sincerely understood the obligation to remember that school shootings are an ongoing, unmitigated problem in this country. It reminded us how far we are from an actionable solution, and evoked the notion that we have to continue to sit with our discomfort, because without it we have no impetus to take action to prevent innocent students from losing their lives due to the recklessness of the education system. Not offering solutions to mass gun violence turned out to be intentional—we as an audience were meant to leave the theater with a strong need to be a part of finding and implementing aforementioned solutions.

I attended this performance on a press pass from Berlin Rosen.