One of the less inspiring things about the movement led by student survivors of the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School shooting has been the conspiracy theory—proliferated in the swampy depths where such things proliferate—that the students are actually “crisis actors.” It’s a warped brand of trutherism that spread after Sandy Hook and has since, as my colleague Eric Lach wrote this week, been impossible to reason with. But that isn’t to say that the kids aren’t actors. Cameron Kasky, the seventeen-year-old firebrand who started the Never Again movement with his classmates, told Wolf Blitzer, “Well, if you had seen me in our school’s production of ‘Fiddler on the Roof,’ you would know that nobody would pay me to act for anything.”
Taken aback, Blitzer responded, “ ‘Fiddler on the Roof’ is a great—who did you play, by the way?” (My question, too.) The answer was Motel the Tailor, and Kasky, staying remarkably on message, told him, “And I have to tell you, what we’ve seen so far is a ‘Miracle of Miracles.’ ”
For former high-school-theatre kids, it’s a point of pride to see one of our own elevated to civic hero. “All these kids are drama kids, and I’m a dramatic kid, so it really meshes well,” Emma González, one of Kasky’s compatriots, told Emily Witt. (Kasky had just left drama class when the shooting began.) On Thursday, the morning after Kasky asked Senator Marco Rubio if he would promise not to take any more donations from the N.R.A. (he wouldn’t), Kasky tweeted, “Using my in flight chat to learn my Spring Awakening lines.” He was referring to the Tony Award-winning rock musical from 2006, by Duncan Sheik and Steven Sater. From the lines he posted (“can we at least consider the fitness of the conjecture?”), it seems he’s playing the lead, Melchior Gabor.
New Yorker writers respond to the Parkland school shooting.
“Spring Awakening” had already been on my mind as I watched Kasky, González, and their classmates show more moral clarity and vision than we’ve seen in the gun debate for a long time. Based on the 1891 play by the German dramatist Frank Wedekind, the musical shows what happens when neglectful adults fail to make the world safe or comprehensible for teen-agers, and the onus that neglect puts on kids to beat their own path forward. The unregulated weapon, in the show, isn’t guns but sex. Melchior and his classmates are burning up with hormones, but in a repressive society that insists on ignorance over truth, sex is never explained. It’s up to the kids to figure it out—badly. At the end of Act I, Melchior and the object of his affection, Wendla, have sex, and when Wendla becomes pregnant she has no idea why. “Why didn’t you tell me everything?” she screams at her mother, who shuffles her off to a botched abortion.
In the musical’s final scene, Melchior visits the grave of his friend Moritz, who killed himself under the weight of school exams and his father’s expectations. “Moritz, my old friend,” he says, kneeling on the grave. “Well, they won’t get to me. Or Wendla. I won’t—I won’t let them. We’ll build that world, together, for our child.” He looks around at “all these little tombs,” before discovering, to his horror, a fresh one for Wendla. Attended by their ghosts, he sings
It’s hard to imagine watching “Spring Awakening” in Broward County, a community where the living are indeed walking on for the dead. Like Melchior, Kasky and his classmates have vowed to remake a world that failed them—a role that no teen-ager should have to play, especially in the wake of tragedy and trauma. We don’t find out what happens to Melchior in the next scene, but I’d like to think that he goes back to school and gives his Latin teacher the same look that Kasky gave Rubio on Wednesday night—one that says that the world no longer belongs to the grownups, because the kids have seen through the B.S. and know that their lives are on the line. (As for the kids in the town-hall audience, I half-expected them to respond to Rubio with a lyric from the Act II showstopper “Totally Fucked”: “Blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah.”)
As it turns out, Sater and Sheik began writing “Spring Awakening” in response to the Columbine massacre. “I had heard that Cameron Kasky was now playing Melchior,” Sater wrote me yesterday. “He has been so eloquent and impassioned, alive with the force of truth—like Melchior himself. I was just discussing that with Duncan earlier today.” (Sheik, for his part, tweeted, “The Spirit of Wedekind lives on holding the feet to the fire of the assholes in the @NRA and their cynical, small minded ilk!”)
“It was a real act of resistance, in 1891, when the angry young Frank Wedekind first penned his ‘Frühlings Erwachen’ (‘Spring Awakening’),” Sater said. “To this day, it remains the most scabrous indictment ever written of adulthood. Of parents, teachers, and a clergy so invested in their social prestige that they will sacrifice even their children to protect it.” He went on, “Perhaps only Wedekind could have imagined, among this ‘Columbine generation,’ a young hero, a Melchior, like Cameron Kasky, like Emma González, like Ryan Deitsch, capable of standing so strong, of speaking the bald truth to the ever-collected, if contorted, face of power. I know I am profoundly affected to hear, in their simple demands, the play’s fierce original spirit: ‘Why did you let them? You broke it. Fix it.’ ”
