by Dave Cullen
Several news outlets ran stories leading with that quote, including Teen Vogue and Newsweek. That evening, Douglas junior Tyah-Amoy Roberts tweeted David with a link to one of them. “Don’t get me wrong @davidhogg111,” she tweeted. “I appreciate your gesture of calling out the media for the lack of black faces in the aftermath of the incident at our school, but I don’t recall (nor do any of our black peers at Douglas) getting any invites from you to . . .” She maxed out her character count there, and continued in a long thread: “join the #NeverAgain ‘figureheads’ at any of your meetings or interviews. This is not the first time you have called out racial disparity, but you have yet to take tangible action to help change it with your classmates. So here’s my challenge to you: allow me to be the first Volunteer to take a seat at the table with you guys to advocate for a cause that has affected everyone at MSD regardless of race. After all, as has been previously stated in the media, ‘these parkland kids are eloquent and outspoken,’ and just like you, I fall into that category.” She tagged various cable news anchors, Bernie Sanders, and several of the MSD kids. It drew a lot of responses and nearly four hundred retweets.
Five days later, Tyah-Amoy joined a group of eight African American Douglas students conducting a press conference outside the school to chastise both MFOL and the media for ignoring them. “I am here today with my classmates because we have been sorely underrepresented and in some cases misrepresented,” Tyah-Amoy said. “The Black Lives Matter movement has been addressing the topic since the murder of Trayvon Martin in 2012 and we have never seen this kind of support for our cause. We surely do not feel that the lives or voices of minorities are valued as much as those of our white counterparts. The media have neglected us, our peers have neglected us, though they are doing great work. And we have neglected ourselves until this very moment, by not using our voice to demand to be seen and acknowledged. Well, here we are. Do you see us?”
That evening, Nadege Green, an African American reporter for South Florida’s public radio station, tweeted out a series of photos and video from the press conference, beginning: “A group of Black students from Marjorie Stoneman Douglas High called a press conference today to say they have concerns that may not mirror those of their white peers. And that the media should listen. #MSDStrong.” She was retweeted over thirty thousand times.
Green pointed out that the national media had mostly missed the press conference as well. She wrote that about eight news organizations had shown up, most of them local. The national media was noticing now. And Green tweeted a powerful clip of Tyah-Amoy’s speech, which gave them the video so crucial to turning it viral. A bevy of national coverage followed.
Tyah-Amoy was right. Over the next few months, MFOL added nearly ten members, all Douglas students, mostly African American. When it launched the next big phase of the movement in June, Tyah-Amoy was a proud member of the group.
18
Graduation
1
Cameron was a ball of stress. The musicals were supposed to be a relief from the activism, and they were, but he had loaded up a full plate before his school was attacked. “Obviously, I could barely get him to rehearsal,” Christine Barclay said. “He really did try to abide by the rehearsal schedule, but there were times it was impossible.”
“And try directing him,” Barclay said. She would say, “OK, Cameron, can you please put your phone down?” and he’d say, “I’m texting George Clooney,” or the kids from Sandy Hook. “How do you direct the King of the World? He’s literally become basically famous for talking down to grown-ups, and putting them in their place.” She reconsidered. That was strong, but that’s how it felt. He was a handful. And her hands were literally full with her newborn—the kids got used to her nursing in the rehearsal, calling out directions while Caroline quietly ate. All of them were in over their heads.
It got worse when Cam was under attack. “It kind of got to a point where I kept yelling at everybody online who would harass them,” Barclay said. “I mean, these are kids. Yeah, maybe they’re saying something too aggressively or they’re being a little brazen or being emotional. But these are seventeen-year-old kids. They’re not supposed to know how to handle this. They’re already having enough trouble navigating who they’re taking to prom and what to do with their acne; how are they supposed to know how to handle a media onslaught and people throwing mud at them? It’s like Lord of the Flies.”
Opening night for Spring Awakening was May 2. As showtime hurtled toward them, everyone was feeling the heat. “And the other kids were kind of sitting on pins and needles, because they had been holding down the fort,” Barclay said. “It was like, ‘Dudes, please pull this off, because we’ve been here.’”
But then Obama wrote an article about them, Time named them to its 100 Most Influential list, they were invited to the White House Correspondents’ Dinner . . . it just didn’t stop. “He tried, he really tried, but Cam would come to rehearsals, Alfonso would come to rehearsals, all these kids would come to rehearsals from red-eye flights,” Barclay said. “They’d come in looking bleary eyed, and it’s like, ‘OK guys, now you have a seven-hour rehearsal where you have to sing and cry’—and then they’d get on a plane and go back to wherever.”
They had the lines, and the moves, but they were holding back. Barclay was frustrated. “I finally said, ‘You guys are known for your big voices. I can’t hear you!’” Those big media voices, that was the trouble. The stage demands a certain bravado: faking it when you don’t feel it, projecting to the back row. Activism can too, sometimes: tussling with a US senator when you haven’t even begun AP gov class, and you’re certain of the objective but fuzzy on the details, and can never let a whiff of uncertainty show. Broadway actors do it two hours a night, eight shows a week, and they’re exhausted. These kids were spent.
There was another issue. There was a gunshot. It felt unthinkable to fire a gun in that community that spring, but it was a crucial plot point, the suicide. Moritz shot himself, and his ghost returned to argue with Cameron in the climactic graveyard scene. Barclay consulted with a lot of people. The conversation veered between “You have to leave it in because it’ll be too much of a statement not to” and “It would be giving in too much if you don’t. You have to rip off the Band-Aid.”
Barclay didn’t bring the gun prop to the set. “We didn’t even want to go there. Astin, who played Moritz, kept using his fingers.” Two days before the opening, Barclay finally brought in a plastic gun. “Everyone took a moment. It’s plastic. I showed it to them when it was still orange, before we sprayed it black. They just kind of stared at it.”
Meanwhile, her assistant director watched a lot of other performances on YouTube and discovered that many omitted the blast. OK, Barclay decided. He would raise it to his mouth, lights out, and the audience would figure it out. “It’s not going to look like we’re afraid,” she said. “I didn’t want it to be overdramatic—just dramatic enough.”
The roller coaster to opening night was a lot of fun. A group of Broadway and television entertainers staged several Broadway benefits for Parkland, and gave the kids advice over the phone. The show’s creators, Steven Sater and Duncan Sheik, flew down for opening night and did a talk-back with the kids after the show. “We came to honor you guys,” Sater told them. “Because for us, you guys are like a beacon of hope.”
The kids had done their homework. Cameron asked about the Masked Man in the nineteenth-century text. In that incarnation, Moritz goads Cameron’s character, Melchior, to join him in suicide, and the Masked Man appears to coax him to go on. Both are projections of Melchior’s own psyche, Sater said. “That’s the birth of expressionism in the Western theater. A character walks onstage, as present as everyone else, and yet he’s embodying what’s going on in the mind of another character. Some force, subjective and arbitrary, has entered into scene with a character who is in fact projecting him.” There has been a century of debate about the Masked Man. “To me, he’s the principle of life,
of going on, of going forward,” Sater said. He and Sheik spent eight years wrestling the material to the Broadway stage, and that Masked Man was a conundrum for much of the ride. They actually included him at the Lincoln Center staging six years in. And then they cut him loose. “What we recognized was that in our production, the music played that role,” Sater said. “It provided the propulsion of the story. The impulse which drove us forward. So we no longer needed the Masked Man himself. He had become kind of an irrelevance, or a redundancy.”
They also jettisoned a key plot point from the final scene: Moritz coaxing his best friend to join him in the grave. What worked in the abstract, in nineteenth-century Germany, felt monstrous in the wake of Columbine. “We didn’t want to see the Moritz we had been rooting for all night come back and betray his friend by urging him to kill himself,” Sater said. “It just didn’t make sense to us.”
Confronted with an actual atrocity, they contemplated what the victims might wish for their peers, the distraught survivors, fumbling for a way to walk on. “We pondered that for a really long time,” Sater said. He kept writing different lyrics until he found a theme that felt right. “You go on,” he said. “You carry the loss of those you’ve known with you, and you go forward on their behalf as well as your own. That’s our message: ‘Those you’ve known and lost still walk beside you.’” That’s the final note that closes the show. “I don’t think our show would have the resonance it has had without that song, without that message,” Sater said. “I don’t know that so many people would be performing the show today.”
It’s a theme so many stricken communities have chosen, depicting their lost children as angels, silently walking beside them, encouraging the survivors on. It took the Columbine survivors eight years to break ground on their permanent memorial, and Dawn Anna Beck, who lost her daughter, Lauren Townsend, in the library, spoke on behalf of the dead. “They’re here,” she said. “Can you feel them? Our angels?” Six months later, Spring Awakening opened on Broadway with Melchior’s fallen comrades encouraging him on. And by the second sunset after the Parkland shooting, seventeen giant angels were illuminating Pine Trails Park.
As Sater returned to New York, he found he had not left Parkland behind him. Haunted by thoughts of his visit to Douglas, and the memories of vacations in Florida he’d enjoyed in high school, he found himself writing a sonnet:
with the students of Stoneman Douglas
In my dream I knew the sorrow had no end,
and I would fall upon this in regret,
for my unremembered Florida—the bald flamingos on the table lamps,
the days of suntanned childhood here I spent . . .
Today I went (remember this, as Florida), to school I went,
and I the public, I the scarecrow man,
to study, with the schoolchildren, how not a word they wept;
their bleeding throats perhaps too numb
to sing some song of student death,
another, call it, battle hymn,
an outlet song for our America;
Walt Whitman’s psalm within the night, by now so far recessed,
the earth itself absorbed their cries, the guns renew their threats.
And in mid-April, most of the original Broadway cast of Spring Awakening came down to Boca to meet with them for a master class. Lea Michele, Jonathan Groff, Gideon Glick, and half a dozen more flew in. Lilli Cooper was starring in SpongeBob SquarePants on Broadway, so she FaceTimed. Lots of press appeared to capture it, and the New York Times led its arts section with a feature. The kids idolized these people, and Barclay was eager to bring not only joy to their lives, but wisdom as well. These actors had navigated the peril of dark material: how to take the character to the dark place, without getting lost there yourself.
Both generations warmed up together. Then the pros took seats near the stage to watch them rehearse. They left a few rows open to give them a little breathing room. Phoebe Strole, who played Anna on Broadway, sobbed. She praised their vulnerability during the feedback period. “I can see in your faces and on your bodies what we felt as well when we were first doing the show,” she said. “It’s like taking your heart out of your chest and shoving it at us.”
Volume was still an issue, though. Gideon Glick, who played Ernst on Broadway, told them they had to be louder. “I don’t want to be a Jewish mother,” he added apologetically.
“Please Jewish-mother them,” Barclay said.
They wanted help with the vulnerability without discussing the source directly. Cameron was his usual silly self through most of the rehearsal, but tensed up when someone asked a question headed that way. “We want to talk less about the shooting,” he said.
The kids were generally delirious. Alfonso called the actors “his celebrity crushes and dreams.” But awe came at a price. He had to simulate masturbation a few rows away from them, big and bold, projecting way beyond them to the empty back rows. The Times described him as “ashen” when he was done.
That was nothing, Barclay said. Wait till opening night: “Simulating sex in front of their moms and dads. It’s different than getting up there for a March for Your Life speech talking about gun control.”
“It was so uncomfortable,” Cameron’s mom said. “I kept my eyes directly on the ground. I didn’t want them seeing me with my head turned. My husband had purchased the seats and in his mind front row was a great idea, but in this context, Cameron does not want to see his mother in the front row. He didn’t say that, but it was pretty obvious. I was five shades of purple, super proud.”
The show sold out both nights, so they added two more. They went on without Alfonso. The previous weekend, he had had a tough choice to make. The White House Correspondents’ Dinner—when would they get an invite like that again? Seemed like an opportunity for the movement—and a desperately needed break. But it meant missing tech rehearsals. Cameron stayed, Alfonso went, and lost his place in the show. Alex Wind, an understudy and one of the MFOL leaders, took his place.
Opening night, most of the MFOL kids came to support Cameron, Sawyer, Alex, and all the other Douglas kids taking this on. And they were having a blast. They were scattered about the audience in little clusters, searching each other out at intermission, snickering over “The Bitch of Living,” and “My Junk,” and their friends miming masturbation. They were making plans for the prom, three nights away. During intermission, there was a mild commotion midway back in the audience. Dozens of kids were leaning in toward one magnetic figure, hidden inside a hoodie pulled up over her head, arms flailing, miming some frenetic scenario. David was beside her, giggling uncontrollably. Finally, the hood dropped back just enough to reveal a wispy little butterfly of a young woman. Emma, of course.
But not everyone was responding the same. Dylan Baierlein, perpetually silly and able to find a laugh in anything, looked stricken in the men’s room line. “It’s a lot,” he said gravely. They hadn’t even gotten to the death of his best friend yet, or the graveyard scene, but Dylan knew it was coming. He was very close to Cameron. It was hard.
It was a rollicking performance, and the crowd was cheering throughout. When the last scene arrived, and Cameron entered the graveyard, the room fell silent. He discovered Wendla’s gravestone, grasped what had happened, and collapsed onto the stage floor sobbing so convincingly through dialogue that it was hard not to picture him holding on to Holden in lockdown. The ghost of his dead friend Moritz then appeared; Cameron told him he’d had the right idea and drew the razor to his neck. But then Wendla rose and both ghosts gently coaxed him back in song:
Those you’ve known,
And lost, still walk behind you.
All alone,
Their song still seems to find you. . . .
He put away the blade and joined them:
All alone,
But still I hear their yearning;
Through the dark, the moon, alone there, burning.
He gathered his resolve, to live on, to walk on, to
call out their names, and belted out:
You watch me
Just watch me. . . .
And one day all will know.
It was eerie. As if the part had been written for these kids. It practically had been. Sater and Sheik had embarked on the project to honor the children of Columbine.
The full cast returned, for a final coda number, which began:
Listen to what’s in the heart of a child,
A song so big in one so small. . . .
And when they finished, the applause was uproarious, and for several minutes, the audience remained on its feet. Twelve hundred miles away, an hour or so later, about three dozen shows would take curtain calls on Broadway, and many of their casts would bow to thunderous applause. It might sound the same, but nothing on Broadway could match the feeling in that room in Boca. This audience was applauding not just the performances, but their willingness to go there. To take us there.
Cameron, in particular. I couldn’t help but hear the voice of that Parkland teacher at the march two months earlier: “Too much responsibility for these kids.” When he wasn’t onstage that weekend, Cameron seemed light as a feather. The second show was a Sunday matinee, and three hours earlier, he was clowning around in the studio next door, trying to break a castmate out of his meditation with silly jokes. He was wearing his dog tag from the Peace Warriors. The blue one, to match his outfit.
Not too much responsibility, I thought. Just enough.
