THE
LIBRARY
Steven
Soderbergh, best known for his many film and TV directing credits, is at the
helm of this Scott Z. Burns play at the Public’s Newman Theatre. Despite a
script inspired by the Columbine High School shootings, and a cast starring the
excellent 17-year-old Chloë Grace Moretz, the results are mixed.
Chloe Grace Moretz. Photo: Joan Marcus.
THE
LIBRARY, set “in the near future,” concerns the aftermath of a mass shooting in
a high school library during which Caitlin Gabriel (Ms. Moretz), when
threatened at the barrel of a gun, is reported by a fellow student, Ryan Mayes
(Daryl Sabara), to have told the 21-year-old killer, Marshall Bauer, where six
other students were hiding. The killer
then wounded her so badly she nearly died. The student who emerges from the tragedy
as the hero is a born-again Christian girl named Joy Sheridan, said to have led
her classmates in prayer before she was shot. The story gains national attention,
inspiring Joy’s pious mother, Dawn (Lili Taylor), to devote herself to burnishing
her daughter’s life; she even writes a highly profitable best-selling book
which will become a movie. (There’s a chilling scene between Dawn and her
publisher [David L. Townsend] that lays bare the way in which people, even
well-meaning ones, use the media for self-aggrandizement.) Caitlin, however, despite
her sincerity and academic abilities, is disgraced both locally and nationally,
and even deprived of adequate victim’s compensation, because of Ryan’s
allegations, which she staunchly denies. Her parents, who aren’t sure if she’s
telling the truth, are undergoing marital troubles that reveal their own fabric
of lies and deceptions. All along, a determined police detective (Tamara Tunie)
conducts an investigation into the circumstances surrounding the shooting and
Caitlin’s role in it. Caitlin’s failure to be completely forthcoming only
complicates matters.
THE
LIBRARY touches on the ways the media exploit stories and shape their
narratives, even before all the facts are in. However, its RASHOMON-like
implications of what is truth and what is not are overlooked when, to all
intents and purposes, what actually happened is revealed, which therefore
removes any ambiguity that might remain. No examination of the killer’s motives
is presented, as the play is concerned more with the outcome of the shootings
than their cause.
Mr.
Burns’s 90-minute, intermissionless play, while rather slight, is made more interesting
than it deserves by Mr. Soderbergh’s movie-influenced staging, supported by
arresting visuals and a gripping sound design by Darron L. West and M. Florian
Staab. Ignoring the script’s description of a naturalistic school library, including
a bloodstained carpet, Riccardo Hernandez’s minimalist, modernist set is
essentially an open space with five sleek desks and chairs on a shiny black
floor, with a cyclorama at the rear. David Lander’s brilliant lighting, using
potently dramatic colors and perfectly placed spotlights, creates a vivid
scenescape that also allows for memorable silhouetting.
The
acting has a dry, low-keyed, conversational quality that rarely opts for big
emotions; these people, regardless of what’s churning inside them, keep their
feelings in check (although always visible beneath the surface), which focuses
attention on the events affecting them. Ms. Taylor’s understated, superficially
kind Dawn Sheridan is made even scarier because of the restraint with which she’s
portrayed.
Ms. Moretz, though, is the big takeaway; a terrifically talented
young actress, she does a masterful job of capturing the troubled Caitlin’s
dilemma, laying bare the character’s fear, anger, sensitivity, bewilderment,
and frustration in a world where what sells and inspires is often the opposite
of what’s true and moral.
