A Double Feature of Two One Act Plays performed back to back on the same evening. Two Plays, Two Directors - Lord of the Flies (directed by SIYT Artistic Director Jonathan Salt) presented as the first act with Bang! Bang! You're Dead directed by SIYT's Founder Member Tyler Mortimer. Tyler cut his directorial teeth as Jonathan's Assistant Director of Vision.

"Lord of the Flies" is Nobel Prize-winning author William Golding's tale of a group of school children on a deserted island who try to govern themselves, but with disastrous results. It's core discussion of how culture created by man fails has maintained it's place as a controversial and challenging piece.

"Bang Bang You're Dead" is a one act play written by William Mastrosimone to raise awareness of school violence and its causes. The plot focuses on a high school student who murders his parents and five classmates. The play was performed over 15,000 times in the first three years after its publication.

Lord of the Flies Rehearsals

Bang Bang You're Dead Rehearsals

Background

Lord of the Flies was written during the first years of the Cold War atomic age the events seem to arise in the midst of World War II. The children whose actions form the superficial subject of the book are from a school in Britain. Some are ordinary students, while others, arrive as an already-coherent body under an established leader; so does, for example, the choir. The book portrays their descent into savagery, contrasting with other books that had lauded the inevitable ascendancy of a higher form of human nature, as in Two Years Vacation, published by Jules Verne in 1888. Left to themselves in a paradisiacal country, far from modern civilization, the well-educated children regress to a primitive state.

At an allegorical level, the central theme is the conflicting impulses toward civilization—live by rules, peacefully and in harmony—and towards the will to power. Different subjects include the tension between groupthink and individuality, between rational and emotional reactions, and between morality and immorality. How these play out, and how different people feel the influences of these, forms a major subtext of Lord of the Flies. Many of these themes were controversial at the time of the book's publication.

The "Das Bus" episode of The Simpsons is also based on this book. The episode Kamp Krusty has several elements from Lord of the Flies as well (a pig's head on a spear, kids using primitive weapons and wearing war paint and a burning effigy). The TV Series Lost draws many of its initial plot devices and themes from Lord of the Flies, most notably being based around a plane crash on a desert island, the existence of a 'beast' and the emerging tensions between two leaders, one of whom happens to be named "Jack". The overweight Hurley occasionally serves as the voice of reason, much like the novel's Piggy.

Bang Bang You're Dead was written in the wake of three school shootings: Thurston High School (Springfield, Oregon) in May 1998, Heath High School (Paducah, Kentucky) in December 1997, and Westside Middle School (Jonesboro, Arkansa) in March 1998. The names of the cities in which these shootings took place are echoed multiple times within the script. The tragedy most significant to the play was the the shooting at Thurston High School. The play, based strongly on the events that surrounded this particular school shooting, premiered at Thurston. It was performed by Thurston students, some of whom had been wounded in the shooting by Kip Kinkel.

Mastrosimone wrote the first draft while troubled by a recent event at his son's school, in which an anonymous classmate of his son wrote a message on a chalkboard, threatening to kill his classmates and his teacher. The premier of Bang, Bang, You're Dead! was met with some criticism and controversy as well as praise and even endorsement. Some locals were hostile towards the production at first, finding the title to be “irreverent” towards those affected by the recent shooting.

Many thought that Mastrosimone was using the recent tragedies to “cash in” and make a profit from the play, unaware that Mastrosimone would be collecting no royalties from performances (the piece is available for free download and performance without royalty - one reason it's been performed so often). The principle of Thurston High School received many calls “mostly hostile and frequently 'from people who don't know anything about it' ”. Bang, Bang,You're Dead!, was immediately endorsed by the Ribbon of Promise, a group dedicated to nonviolence in schools, formed in Springfield after the shooting. According to Mastrosimone, it “is a drama to be performed by kids, for kids” for free.