“Columbinus”
Written by Stephen Karam and PJ Paparelli
Showing: Raven Theatre, 6157 N. Clark St., through March 15
Tickets: $25
Contact: (773) 338-2177; www.raventheatre.com

By Lawrence Bommer

CFP theater editor

No crime scene investigation could be more meticulous, contextual or insightful than this 135-minute offering by the United States Theatre Project. In the spirit and style of “The Laramie Project,” “Columbinus” (which ironically means “dove-like” in Latin) is a communal docudrama based on testimony gathered from police transcripts, survivors and, crucially, the two mass murderers of the 1999 Columbine High School massacre. The authors may have visited Littleton, Colorado to get the details right and the scenario straight but the events they deliver with scary intensity are a once and future tragedy. Taking us from Cain and Abel to Virginia Tech, the play dares us to do something as it makes us feel everything.

Kinetically shaped by Greg Kolack, Raven Theatre’s local premiere could not be more in your face and heart. It persuasively employs a giant chalkboard, chilling props, Goth rock anthems, choral chanting, overlapping dialogue and graphic video. Mike Tutaj’s all-purpose slides and sounds depict chatroom conversations, cliques and stereotypes, instant messages, websites where Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris easily learned to make pipe bombs, the video game Doom, the violence-drenched fantasies that should have been red flags (but are treated by the teacher as pure imagination), pix of the killers as they prepare for total slaughter, text and audio of a horrific call to 911 and, most hauntingly, photos of the 13 dead who thought they were safe in a school.

The eight actors initially depict the morning rituals of sullen teenagers. Quickly the action gets painfully specific, depicting identity crises, bullying by arrogant jocks, dead-end dates and interviews with clueless and indifferent guidance counselors and “juvenile diversion” officers. The pell-mell presentation offers no easy answers, just hapless group portraits of passive parents, segregated cafeterias and school officials who ignore student threats rather than invade their privacy. Oh, and there are also two boys (wrenchingly played by Jamie Abelson and Matthew Klingler) angry enough to kill themselves by murdering their own. The banality of evil never looked so familiar: These sad souls forge an emergency friendship based on not just excluding excluders, but executing them.

Beyond just the awkwardness of adolescence, most of us still really remember high school, without the anesthesia of nostalgia. “Columbinus” brings it all back, screaming and kicking—the ultimate insult of “faggot,” the feeling that nothing will get better so the future is no friend, revenge fantasies rationalized as “natural selection” against life’s homegrown terrorists. The ready availability of guns gives memories new menace. What passes for innocence in 2008? Kolack’s eight actors reinvent so much that’s familiar even as the script approaches the unthinkable, then unleash it like a theater bomb. Whenever a Columbine erupts, blame pointing can hardly be avoided (nor should it)—but more important is to recognize this world and how much we let it happen.