Columbinus includes excerpts from discussions with parents, survivors and community leaders in Littleton as well as diaries and home video footage to reveal what it refers to as "the dark recesses of American adolescence".
A few productions have included a brief scene discussing the story of the Columbine survivor who wrote to Mike Judge about "Wings of the Dope," an episode of King of the Hill which she credited with enabling her to grieve a boy she never got to tell she loved, who turned out to be one of the perpetrators (resulting in her being pressured to repress her grief).
"[5] When Columbinus premiered in 2005 at the Round House Theatre, Peter Marks of The Washington Post called it "An ambitious examination of the suburbanization of evil, directed with a surefire sense of theatricality by PJ Paparelli."
Here, scribes Karam and Paparelli drop the universal material of teen angst garnered from interviews in favor of words drawn from the private diaries, emails and videotapes that go a long way in exploring the twisted thinking behind the shootings... the production is especially well served by the wall of sound created by Martin Desjardins to suggest the demonic thoughts ricocheting in the boys' brains as they bought guns, made bombs, dressed to kill and worked themselves into a homicidal frame of mind by obsessing on their grievances as social outcasts.
"[7] The New York Times reviewer (of the Off-Broadway production) wrote: "Mr. Karam and Mr. Paparelli have captured authentic notes of adolescent anxiety and yearning in briskly drawn scenes set in and around the classroom, the gym and the cafeteria.
And when the focus shrinks to the actual killings, and the dialogue is drawn from the testimony of the survivors of the rampage, the play becomes more upsetting still... ultimately don't offer any illuminating new views of the tangle of psychological and cultural factors behind it (including, of course, the easy availability of guns).