The Library

I was intrigued by the news that Steven Soderbergh was directing a play called The Library at the Public Theater. Yesterday, on the last day of the limited engagement, I saw it. I have mixed feelings about it.

The play is by Scott Z. Burns, who has collaborated with Soderbergh on the films Contagion, Side Effects, and The Informant! It is about a Columbine-like school shooting, and features Chloe Grace Moretz as a survivor of the massacre, who is accused by a witness of revealing where other students were hiding to the killer.

Columbine, much like 9/11, has become a dividing point in our culture and history. There is before Columbine and after. There have been other works styled after the shootings, most notably Gus Van Sant's Elephant. The Library, though, ultimately has less to say about what the increasingly common spree killers means in our collective psyche than it simply is a "he said, she said" puzzle.

Performed on an antiseptic, almost bare stage, The Library begins with Moretz, already on stage as the audience files in, lying on metal table, as if in a morgue. We hear recorded voices of her doctors as they save her life. She was hit with a shotgun blast by a pizza delivery man and former student, who went into the library and killed a number of students. Another survivor (Daryl Sabala) remembers hearing a student praying before she was killed, and then Moretz tell the killer that there were other students hiding in an A.V. closet. Those students were all killed.

Moretz is painted as a villain in the national press, especially after she accuses the praying student of being the one who tipped off the killer. That girl's mother (Lili Taylor) a Jesus freak, sanctimoniously denies this, offering Moretz her forgiveness even after she writes a best-seller, calling Moretz a liar.

Clearly Burns was inspired by the girl who supposedly said she believed in God before she was killed at Columbine, which has since been called into question. True believers may not like the way Burns paints the religious as unwilling to see the truth, but I had no problem with it.

Soderbergh directs the play oddly. As I said, the stage is largely bare, the lighting and sound harsh. But the differing approaches to the acting struck me as strange. Moretz, now 17, is terrific, but seems like she's in a different play. Her parents, played by Michael O'Keefe and Jennifer Westfeldt, speak their lines in a formal, almost artificial way, while Moretz is very naturalistic, emotionally fragile, and authentic. Except for one moment, when he breaks down upon reading that his daughter thinks he doesn't believe her, O'Keefe plays a man who seems like he's not emotionally engaged.

I think the artists in this country still don't how to respond to Columbine or its successors, like Sandy Hook. We've gotten some lip service, glancing at the issue, but we haven't gotten to the heart of it. The Library is a good play, but it doesn't choose to come to any conclusions.