What do we do about gun violence? That’s the question 20 or so high school students from Dallas’ Cry Havoc Theater Company set out to answer. They wanted to begin a conversation about guns and gun ownership with people involved in the debate surrounding one of the most divisive issues in our country.
This exploration resulted in a documentary-style theater piece called Babel. The Elevator Project, which brings small and emerging Dallas-based arts groups into Arts District performance spaces, chose Babel for its current season. It opened Thursday at the AT&T Performing Arts Center’s Hamon Hall.
In Hamon Hall, shoes hang from floor to ceiling and surround a casket in the room’s center. Cry Havoc created this large-scale art installation known as "The Cenotaph" as a memorial to honor victims of gun violence. The installation will serve as a backdrop for Babel.
Babel, part documentary and part dramatic presentation, consists entirely of words collected by students during their interviews with voices on multiple sides of the debate over gun ownership and gun violence.
Mara Richards Bim, Cry Havoc’s director and founder, conceived this project during the course of making the company’s previous documentary play, Shots Fired, which dealt with the Dallas police shootings in 2016.
“The issue of guns just kept coming up,” Bim says.
“The issue of guns just kept coming up." – Mara Richards BimShe presented the idea to her young actors, a group mainly made up of DISD students, and they soon began to research the heavy topic.
Over spring break, eight of the students traveled to Connecticut and interviewed parents whose children were killed in the shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary in 2012. They prepared for those meetings by watching
