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EDITORIAL
Playing with fire

Jim Coggins

Last fall, my wife and I attended a drama festival in which local high schools presented eight plays over the course of three evenings. We attended only one evening, but our daughter, who was in one of the plays, attended all three evenings. I was impressed by the skill and talent displayed by the young actors. I was also impressed by the depth and technical quality of the scripts, some of them written by the students themselves. However, it was the content of the plays that really caught our attention.

The first play on the night we attended was about the evil of war. The second play was about teen suicide; it began with a teen committing suicide and ended with her abusive father committing suicide. The third was about a student who, Columbine-style, murdered his parents and then shot and killed five students at his school; most of the action was driven by the dead students, who were haunting the mind of the killer.

On the other evenings, according to our daughter, the other plays concerned:

child abuse and suicide; teen pregnancy; eating disorders (this play evidently included a brief scene in which the actors appeared in their underwear, to demonstrate that they were not ashamed of their bodies); a love triangle that turned violent.

One other play was so surrealistic that our daughter said she wasn’t sure what it was about.

What stood out to us in these plays was the negative themes, the unrelenting portrayal of evil and despair. We left the theatre feeling depressed, and our daughter was even more depressed. The content of one of these plays was considered so “adult” that students at the school needed to have parental permission to see it, and the youngest students at the school were not even given the option of seeing it.

Now, generally I prefer drama to deal with real issues, so I don’t have a great problem with the themes chosen. What was disturbing about these plays is that there were no answers or solutions to the evils presented. There were no healthy families portrayed in the plays I saw, the closest example being a policeman who was a single parent in the suicide play; he apparently loved his daughter even though they rarely talked or hugged and she had to sneak out of the house to find a boy friend to confide in. The same play suggested that a teen crisis phone line and a determination to “keep on helping people” could be alternatives to suicide, but admitted that these were not enough to keep the central character from committing suicide. There was no mention of forgiveness in any of the plays. The play about the teen killer suggested that there is no afterlife. The only clergyman in the plays was a bigot who incited racist violence.

The point of this editorial is not to criticize the schools for their play selection, nor the students (remembering that some of these plays were written by the students themselves). The point of this editorial is that the plays revealed something very significant about today’s teens (and also their teachers), about the worldview they live in. The plays portrayed a purely human society with no presence of God, and frankly very little hope. The play about the teen killer ended with him sobbing “Oh, God”, but, like similar uses of the phrase in the plays, this appeared to be meaningless – no one really expected God to answer. The plays portrayed a dark and hopeless world.

We desperately need to understand that this is the world that today’s teens, including our own teens, inhabit. I am convinced that Jesus Christ has the answers to the problems presented in the plays, but it was very clear that those answers are not getting through to today’s teens, who so desperately need them. We appear to be losing a spiritual war that half the time we don’t even know we are in. We need to fight harder, and smarter. The issues that our teens are wrestling with are matters of life and death, heaven and hell, and youth programs that are focused solely on “having fun” and “providing wholesome recreation” are simply not going to be adequate.

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Last modified March 13, 2002.

© 2002 Mennonite Brethren Herald.
Published by the Canadian Conference of MB Churches.
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