Cruel Truths Always Survive a Shooting - Steven Soderbergh Directs ‘The Library,’ at the Public
Ben BrantleyApril 15, 2014: Toxic dread floods the opening minutes of The Library, which opened on Tuesday night at the Public Theater, and good luck to the audience member who prefers not to be disturbed. It isn’t just the sight of the girl on the table, laid out like a corpse at a mortuary, which greets theatergoers arriving at Scott Z. Burns’s new play. The sound-and-light tsunami that follows leans without mercy on our alarm buttons. Electronic chords vibrate with the suggestion of nerves being plucked; the stage turns a deep, spectral red; the girl’s body becomes an anonymous silhouette. And while the amplified words we hear may be jumbled, we can make out enough to know that they sound horribly familiar. A man with a gun, it seems, has opened fire on the students and staff of a high school.
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