American Love and Trauma

Friday 7th February 2025 - on Zoom

Present: Rachel Bavidge,   Marie Collett, Colin Ellwood, Sara Granato, Sian Macfie, Anthony Ofoegbu, David Whitworth, Julia Winwood

​Code Red by Emily Mann (2024)
 
A timely read on Friday with a great group of a new play in manuscript…beautiful but also devastating in its analysis of US cultural trends and tensions
 
Emily Mann is a distinguished US playwright and director. Her new play Code Red is beautiful, intricate, insightful, compassionate and dramaturgically deft. Intimate in focus it nonetheless bears witness to huge social and political concerns. There is great satisfaction to be had from its close attention to and ‘presence with’ its central characters, as their delicate care-full world of long-term commitments and vocations is tested and threatened by the (related) blights of guns and social anger amidst the erosion of social structures and community care. But this is to describe its concerns in too reductive a way. The play offers a nuanced anatomisation of a complex matrix of forces, both positive and negative.
 
The (almost) single location is the ‘break room’ of a public school in Upper NY State in which three women of working-class origin - school employees and very long-term friends and workmates - regularly meet for mutual solace, support and discussion in between classes and increasingly frequent Active Shooter drills.  Tiz is a 65-year-old Special Education teacher; Kay is 60 and teaches mainstream English, and Mare is an ex-Special Education teaching assistant, now secretary to the school principal. 
 
As we first meet them the women are worried about many things, but a particular focus is Warren, a discontented student who tends to bring his weekend hunting guns to school in his pickup truck.  They agonise about reporting him. Are they overreacting?  Meanwhile a shooting happens in another school 20 miles away. Tiz can’t take it anymore and announces she’s aiming to retire at the end of the school year. For the others, Tiz’s imminent leaving feels like the end of an era in Special Needs teaching at the school.  Her commitment to her students, with its many positive outcomes, is legendary. She loves teaching Special Needs, preparing the kids for the kind of simple tasks in which they might subsequently find meaningful employment (the kind of tasks that, at best, can surely embody a purity for the pure of heart and committed. A bit like teaching…and acting, perhaps, c.f.  ‘A series of simple tasks that speak of life and nature’ – Joe Chaikin).
 
But it’s all getting too much for Tiz, and perhaps for all of them. It’s not just the regular news stories of school shootings and the constant Active Shooter drills. The women’s experience is of a hugely under resourced school alongside apparent management indifference to the complex needs of the students.  They report a marked deterioration in student behaviour; increasingly aggressive or disengaged parents; more ‘detached’ attitudes in newer teachers in search of better ‘work/life balances’; poor pay - and spousal indifference. Their overall conclusion is that, generally in society, ‘everyone’s got selfish’. They also note a continuous decline in parenting over the three generations they have witnessed in their long careers. 
 
If this all sounds like it might be a series of tedious blowhard, self-aggrandising moans, this is not the case. There is something about the guile of the writing, the humility of the characters and the unassuming intricacy of the depicted relationships that allows these views to emerge organically like fumes in a  “Brownian motion’ chamber sampling atmospheric particles and fumes. The friends worry whether they are now really making a difference, in a country that to them seems as if it has stopped really, functionally, caring about kids. They are in fact all thinking of packing it in
 
And yet…
 
Refracted through their mutually supportive and gently probing chat we get a sense of the rich weave and texture of their broader lives. Mare’s mother has Alzheimer’s with various surreal effects; Kim has a Down’s Syndrome child called Hank who is in Tiz’s class.  Hank is apparently something of a star: intrepid, good natured and with a preternatural ability to accurate diagnosis any prevailing societal or situational  malaise. And the kids generally are simultaneously in need and yet full of promise. It is often the apparently unpromising kids who deliver, and sometimes the promising ones who - agonisingly - mess up, although not always.
 
A brilliant student in Kay’s mainstream English class writes an essay on the gun situation. He’d rather kill himself by jumping out the window than face a shooter. His paper, in Kay’s admiring and impassioned account, sets out the broader context of the cultural and political madness, pointing out the absurdity of it all
 
There is nonetheless a general sense of an encroaching apocalypse
 
As news comes through that the teacher shot in the school attack 20 miles away is now seriously disabled for life, Kay reveals to a shocked Tiz that she’s seen Mare carrying a gun in school. When the Principle subsequently gives a talk to staff advocating teacher gun training, Mare admits she’s had the gun for a year and has joined a kind of vigilante group with her partner. She makes the case for being armed, and admits that carrying has changed her. She now checks places out when she is in them and - perhaps more disturbingly for her friends and indicative of a much wider social malaise - she feels powerful ‘instead of nervous and anxious all the time’
 
‘Talk about your whole world changing’, responds Kay
 
‘I’m kind of an evangelist for it now’ says Mare. Is she trying to recruit them?
 
Two months pass, in the meantime Kay’s and Tiz’s estrangement from Mare has deepened. Barb, an ex-trainee of Tiz’s, shows up to take over her class when she retires at the end of the school year. Meanwhile Kay has told her son Hank about Tiz’s imminent leaving without checking with her first,  causing consternation amongst Tiz’s kids, including Hank. The failure of Kay to coordinate the announcement with Tiz feels like a further degrading of the friendship group
 
But now something much more immediately worrying is looming. Warren is still on the radar, and Kay has – uncharacteristically - filed a report to the principal about Warren hitting his girlfriend
 
Armed with her new vigilante worldview Mare seems to be on the boy’s side, and this generates more friction. The implications of Mare ‘carrying’, and the effect on the friendship is becoming apparent, and because the longstanding relationship is so well delineated in the play, we feel the impact of this
 
More time passes. Kay reveals she has had to fail Warren in her English class for poor performance. Ominously, in response, he has started to stalk her. He stares at her constantly. Clearly there will be no help or support from the school hierarchy, or from its hugely under resources guidance provision
 
Warren’s behaviour worsens and Kay’s attempt to approach his parents doesn't help. The mother seems totally disengaged
 
Over the course of the subsequent week the pressure on Kay from Warren intensifies 
 
‘I’m so scared. He has me cornered, and he knows it, and he knows I know it’. 
 
She reveals to her friends' consternation  that she herself has joined a gun class, having been the most vociferous about Mare previously having done the same
 
It emerges that Warren has again driven to school with his hunting guns in the back of his pickup, and Kay must face up to what she might be prepared to do to preserve her own life
 
Then the school alarm sounds. A shot rings out…
 
The play’s climax and the twist it contains is both surprising yet on reflection inevitable. It manages wonderfully and terribly to evince the tragedy and pain that all are susceptible to, whatever sides they take in the binaries and oppositions that we all so easily and simplistically construct and impose
 
Overall then, this is a superbly crafted, compassionate and nuanced ‘beating heart’ of a play, asking that ‘attention be paid’ while managing to chronicle and value hope and love in the most depressing and anxious of situations. It ‘earths’ its huge issues without stridency and with a close focus on compelling individuals. 
 
A few small sighs of undue compression towards the end perhaps (a rather compacted almost choric late appearance of Warren’s mother for example) and a slight risk of hovering towards the corny at times, but a play that amply earns its small licences, by means of its very careful and hugely effective - and authentic - dramatic craft. Its careful balance of joy and despair somehow manages to integrate expertly-managed suspense and wide social and cultural resonance within a richly achieved relationship drama with a Chekhovian sense of the thresholds, sadnesses and strangenesses of life
 
And Hank has the last – and perhaps the most telling and accurate – word

Colin Ellwood