By Ernest Kearney — Crouched over a desk with her back towards the audience, Ava Hase sits facing a black board. Over the dimly lit scene a recorded interview plays. A teacher recounts her survival of a school shooting.
The teacher conveys a torment like that of Jacob Marley, the Dickens character condemned to be shackled by cash boxes and ledger books for his failure to help the poor. The taped teacher is tormented by the silence of her community on the events she experienced and will forever carry those chains.
“A lot of people here,” the tape plays, “are not okay.”
So begins Hase’s I Hear So Extremely Loud.
Hase’s one-woman show, currently running at The Hudson Theatre, during the Hollywood Fringe ’21, is composed of brief selections taken from a half dozen testimonies of those who have actually survived or suffered through a school shooting in America.
There is the nine-year-old student and 29-year-old teacher, survivors of the 2012 shooting in Newtown, Connecticut, when 20-year-old Adam Lanza, (after first killing his mother in bed using the rifle she had given him for Christmas) drove to the Sandy Hook Elementary School where he killed 20 first graders and seven adults with guns from his mother’s extensive collection.
There is the mother whose son was one of the young shooters who murdered 12 fellow students and a teacher at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado in 1999.
Hase flows flawlessly from one character to another, one reality to another shifting each perspective of suffering through the prism of her performance illuminating a differing polarization of a soul’s pain that is as breathtaking to watch as it is heartbreaking.
With sound design by Hayden Bearden and Light Designer Robert Hill-Guarino, Director Oscar Falcon has applied his influence with lunar subtlety that succeeds in realizing a naturalness masking how powerful is its sway, how vital is its presence.
Hase’s composition does not serve as an indictment of political failure or societal breakdown, does not expound on an explanation, advocate a remedy or rage at the murderous madness intrinsic to these episodes.
Like Frankenstein’s creature, Hase’s creation is an assemblage of parts taken from the dead and confronts us with our own reflection.
This is horror enough.
To Ava Hase’s I Hear So Extremely Loud the first PLATINUM MEDAL of the HFF2021.
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I Hear So Extremely Loud
Now At
Hudson Theatres
6539 Santa Monica Boulevard
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For Tickets, Dates and Additional Information Go To:
