A 'Mark On Society'
Summary
All along the bell tower: The campus shooting spree that started it all
Article
'Mark On Society' is spot on
It is often said that art imitates life, but sometimes this is a cyclical process, where the beginning and end, cause and effect, become as convoluted as an MC Escher print. And so it goes with “Mark On Society, A Docu-Drama of the University of Texas Clock Tower Tragedy,” which was scheduled to open on April 20 at Theatre East at the Lex well before another, even bloodier rampage shot up Virginia Tech four gruesome days before the curtain lifted.
Playwright, co-producer and Theatre East president Leif Gantvoort presented the play, along with a statement of regret justifying the decision that the show must, after all, go on. And I, for one, am glad it did: there is nothing in the least exploitative about “Mark On Society,” a thoughtful investigation into what happened, why, and how it affected the slaughtered and the survivors.
The play opens cleverly, cinematically: black and white flickering film clips of the Beatles on “The Ed Sullivan Show,” commercials ballyhooing Pontiac, Coke and Disneyland, and the like, are projected on a screen, hearkening us back to the “B.C.” – Before Cho – era in the mid-1960s. On August 1, 1966, not even three years after President John F. Kennedy was brutally gunned down in Dallas, Texas, ex-Marine Charles Whitman put his deadly sharpshooter skills to work at the University of Texas, Austin. The marksman commandeered the 300-plus foot bell tower and opened fire on the hapless students and others on the sprawling campus below.
Thus Whitman launched America’s modern age of domestic mass murder, often unleashed by lone gunmen (or gun toting boys, as at Columbine High School) at schools, usually their institution of choice. Just as Cho apparently murdered two people before embarking on his hellish mission at Va. Tech, Whitman killed his mother and wife the night before he ran amok with a well-stocked arsenal at UT-Austin.
The intensively researched play brings alive these cataclysmic events in a Brechtian way, told by a large cast through a theatrical polyphony, as different participants in the frightening events recount the day that has reverberated down through America’s sordid history of shootings en masse. Their accounts sometimes have a “Rashomon” quality -- descriptions of the same occurrences from a different point of view.
There’s Whitman’s father, C.A. (Bob Factor), apparently an abusive redneck who keeps insisting that Charlie was “a good boy,” even though Whitman senior always pushed his son, who was never quite good enough. This pressure, but of course, was for Charlie’s own good (and helped make him eventually snap). Remarkably enough, C.A. claims that his son was the youngest Eagle Scout ever, and had an IQ of 138.9. (Hmmm…)
What struck me as even more incredible is who Whitman’s first victims were. The fact that Clair (the touching Anora Wolff) was pregnant is symbolic enough, in terms of shedding light on mother-killer Whitman, who also shot down another pregnant victim during the bedlam. But in addition, Clair, and her boyfriend, were, it turns out, members of Students for a Democratic Society. Well, here it is, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, the America of the sixties, that decade of assassinations, in a nutshell: the military-trained Whitman opening fire on unarmed peaceniks. To compound the irony, the deranged ex-Marine’s other targets included members of the Peace Corps. As ever, America’s insane rightwing slaughters the country’s idealists and innocents. (“Two dead in Ohio,” as Neil Young would soon sing.)
Stuart G. Bennett plays a bored Associated Press correspondent, who yearns to be where the action is – and suddenly, as all hell breaks loose, finds himself in the thick of it, and with a bullet in him (Beware of what you wish for…). Another standout is Ryan Mcgivern, who, to his horror, comes to realize – as he attempts to rescue the felled Clair -- that the assassin in the bell tower is his friend who, just the night before, had confided his maniacal plans to him.
Les Feltmate, the deadly sniper with little dialogue, plays Whitman as a robotic wraith.
The play doesn’t completely answer the searing question “why?” although it does shed some light on these tormented souls whom, as the parlance puts it, “go postal.” Instead of dwelling on the shooter, “Mark On Society” focuses on the survivors, and also tells the stories of those who didn’t live through the bell tower nightmare. Perhaps this is as it should be?
But I’d like to know what makes the Whitmans/Columbine killers/Chos and the like tick. Does it have something to do with the bloodstained origins of our nation, built upon a cruel genocide of this continent’s indigenous peoples, the enslavement of Africans and lest we forget, the indentured servitude of working class whites? Are these gunmen acting out, on the domestic stage, our foreign policy that, even as you read this, is wreaking more mayhem and mass murder? Have you noticed how frequently this country, awash with automatic weapons and other guns at home, and high tech weaponry deployed abroad, goes to war? From UT-Austin to Va. Tech and back to Texas (where two more people were murdered after Cho’s carnage), the cult of the gun, the worshiping of violence (from pop culture to foreign misadventures to Pat Robertson calling for Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez’s assassination), is America’s original sin.
In “Bowling for Columbine” Michael Moore valiantly probed our gun crazy collective psyche, and in telling moments, confronted a hack at a defense plant near Columbine and dared asked if the weapons of mass killing manufactured at this factory, and the violence wrought in former Yugoslavia, influenced the Columbine killers?
Bush had the nerve to show his blood-soaked face at the Virginia Tech memorial service. Compared to this mass murderer, who fried death row inmates in Texas as if they were eggs, and unleashed an apocalyptic genocide in Iraq for which there will be hell to pay for, Cho was truly just a piker. But of course, we Americans always insist that our mass murder be high-minded, conducted in the name of the white man’s burden or democracy or something or other. Where will it all end? Shall we all be consumed in this madness?
I may have entered Theatre East in trepidation, but I left with a renewed appreciation as to what a great theatre town L.A. is. Obscured by all of the Tinseltown razzmatazz, there is really a thriving theatre scene here, made all the more worthwhile and vivid by plays such as Gantvoort’s insightful, and hopeful, meditation on mass murder in America. And perhaps it’s worth noting that in recent years, the Princeton Review named UT-Austin America’s “Number One Party School.”
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