January
Written by Paula Cizmar, Directed by Lorca Peress
as part of the Femme Collective
The Theater at the 14th Street Y at 344 East 14th Street, New York, NY 10003
January 11th - February 1st, 2025
Alinca Hamilton and Darlenis Duran (Photo Credit: John Quilty)
Each day 12 children die from gun violence in America.
I found it difficult to get accurate accounting for 2024’s numbers. What people consider a “Child” or if “school” should only include K - 12 and not college campuses seemed to have a lot to do with the varying tabulations. But whatever the number, it continues to be too high. Since Columbine in 1999, 390,000 children have experienced gun violence at school.
My mother’s generation was taught to hide under desks in case of nuclear attack. By my generation, we knew to just go about our business – nothing was going to save us if missiles were launched. REM sang about the End of the World and Sting hoped the Russians love their children too. But for all its existential dread, GenX never feared someone they’d know since kindergarten picking them off one by one in the cafeteria.
In January, a child is dead at the hands of another child. They’re 12. There was a gun.
This unravels the lives of the two single mothers left behind, the mother of the child lost, and the mother of the shooter. Since their children crossed paths, will they? Will the bereaved mother see the mother of her son’s killer at the grocery store or maybe a club? Would they have empathy for one another or want to avenge their child? Maybe the best revenge is forcing their person to keep living in their shattered world.
Paula Cizmar explores many topics in this 90-minute play. While the primary focus is another senseless gun death. There is also the violence that is poverty, the violence that is the polarizing politicization of gun deaths, and the violence that is the media. For me, it was all too much. Grand scale projections and live camera work heighten the sense of the overwhelming impact of the media (until they find a fresher story to chase). But maybe that’s the point. It’s become too much for all of us, so we have tuned it out and normalized it.
The Center for Disease Control reports the number one cause of death for children in America is gun violence. Every time we fight to open a child-proof cap, we should be reminded that there is so much more we could be doing to save the children of America.
Click HERE for tickets.
Reviewed by Nicole Jesson.
Published by Theatre Beyond Broadway on January 12th, 2025. All rights reserved.