n the new play The Library, Chloë Grace Moretz is a teen who survives a school shooting, only to discover she’s been accused of aiding the shooter.
Joan Marcus
The Library, a new play at New York’s Public Theater, tackles an uncomfortable contemporary topic head on: It looks at the aftermath of a school shooting and peers into the shattered lives of the survivors, and the stories they tell. The play is written by Scott Z. Burns and directed by Steven Soderbergh, who’ve collaborated on three films; most recently, the thriller, Side Effects.
And even before the play begins, Soderbergh and Burns make the audience uneasy. When you enter the theater, a young woman in a hospital gown lies center stage on what could be a table or a bed or a slab in the morgue, Burns says. “People start having to invent a story, you know, which is: Is she alive? Is she not alive? And so they’re already, before we’ve said anything, experiencing what the play is about, which is, you know, you start assembling facts and truths into stories that support your belief set and allow you to keep going.”
Once the play starts, the audience discovers that the young woman onstage is a high school sophomore named Caitlin Gabriel, and although she’s survived a violent massacre, one of the other survivors has gone on TV and accused her of telling the gunman where several victims were hiding.
