Murderous playwriting
Several people today have emailed me with links to the plays of Cho Seung Hui, the student behind the Virginia Tech massacre. Click here if you’d like to read them yourself.
They don’t tell us much beyond this: Mr. Cho was a very bad playwright. Really bad. The dialogue is forced and expositional, the staging doesn’t work, and characters such as the stepfather are set up as paper tigers for other characters to express their viewpoints. In fact, the only thing I like is the stepfather character’s name, Richard McBeef, but then only for a play in the style of Alfred Jarry.
Here’s the statement that these plays do not — repeat, do not — make: that because these are dark, troubled plays, Cho was clearly a dark, troubled person, someone who was going to be a murderer. No. These are dark, troubled plays that happen to be by someone who turned out to be a dark, troubled person who happened to turn out to be a murderer.
It always troubles me when people confuse the unattractive character in a play with its creator. Just because you’ve written racists, pederasts, murderers, and even Republicans into your play doesn’t mean you are one. It means that you are writing about them. Ian Fleming was in no way James Bond, Edgar Rice Burroughs was not raised by apes, and Harriet Beecher Stowe did not have an uncle named Tom.
These things may seem obvious to most of us reading this. Yet all across the net tonight people are reading the plays of Cho Seung Hui and deciding that someone “should have known.” If Cho gave other signs of mental distress, that’s one thing. But the writing in these plays tells us only that he had no future as a playwright.
Except — and here’s an irony — I guarantee that some enterprising director or producer somewhere is right now printing out those plays and getting ready to produce them. Remember, you read it here first.
April 19th, 2007 at 4:00 pm
If we were to look at writings and try to tell a person’s personality from them we would probally misjudge the person.
For example, Steven King, his writings alone would make you think he would be a mass murderer. Would his writings now be looked at and have people worried?
Paul