Passengers

 

I can't put into words the impact this play has had on the fourteen actors who wrote and performed it, the director and crew, and those who attended. By the end of the play, audience and actors alike were in tears. Passengers started out with a simple premise and a seemingly just as simple assignment for the actors: You board a subway train with a bunch of other people, you get stranded underground and the doors won't open - what do you do? Design your own character and figure out how they interact with others on the train. 

The actors created their characters: who they were, what they did for a living, what they looked like, their backstory, their opinions, and how they would react to the situation and to what other passengers did. They began this journey September 23rd. 

On September 23rd, there were three mass shootings - shootings in which four or more are injured or killed in one location, not including the shooter - that day in the United States. One of them too close to home, on Albany Ave. in Hartford, CT, where two were killed and two injured. From September 23rd, 2017 until their first performance on December 8, 2017, there were at least sixty mass shootings. Nearly 150 people were killed and over 700 injured in mass shootings in just 77 days.

6 were killed and 12 injured at Rancho Tehama Elementary School in Corning, California.

27 were killed and 20 injured at First Baptist Church in Sutherland Springs, Texas.

59 were killed and 441 were injured at Mandalay Bay, Las Vegas, Nevada.

An average of eleven victims of mass shootings a day from the day the cast began designing their characters. 

No wonder Passengers plays out the way it does. Fourteen people trapped on a subway train. One is just trying to get home from school. Another needs to get to a meeting so he doesn't lose his bid for permanent residency at a cocoon house. A couple are tourists from small towns - one trying to figure out the crazy city and one looking to make friends. One is homeless, just trying to find somewhere where she is welcome. Two are on their way to their jobs - one worried about getting fired and disappointing his family, another not wanting to let his crew down. There's a mother trying to get to her kids at daycare, an aunt is looking to get out of the life she's found herself trapped in and just wants to make it to her niece's birthday party. A drug addict went cold turkey and lost her job all in the course of three days, and just needs a fix. A manager is just trying to get work done, and a playwright and her ailing friend are just there to observe typical life on the subway. The senator's son follows a woman he thinks he recognizes onto the train. And someone has a gun. And tensions build as the passengers are trapped for longer and longer, until the situation explodes. 

We don't know how many Passengers were injured. We know at least one is killed. The news report makes plenty of mention of the Senator's son - the shooter, but not one word about the hero. Wanda Sutherland just wanted to make friends. She just wanted to help an addict through suicidal thoughts. She just wanted to talk, to the suicidal addict, then to the senator's son who somehow ended up with the gun, to reassure, to help, to care, to have them put the gun down. 

She put herself second and saved others in the process.  Just like the heroes the teens had to work so hard to find information on and photos of. Like Joshua McGill who, at the Pulse Night Club, Orlando, FL shooting, saved a bartender with gunshot wounds and rode with him to the hospital, talking to him and reassuring him the entire way there. And Robert Engle, and usher at Burnette Chapel Church of Christ in Antioch, TN,  who on September 24, 2017, confronted the shooter, was pistol whipped, got his own pistol out of his vehicle after the shooter accidentally shot himself in the chest in the process of attacking Robert, and then and held the shooter at gunpoint until authorities arrived. And Marian Fisher, an Amish school girl, who told the shooter to "shoot me first" in hopes of saving her classmates. 

There was no curtain call. These fourteen teens decided to instead concentrate on the real heroes of this story - the victims and heroes and first responders and families and all those affected by mass shootings. 

Let us stand in their places.