True crime meets Elizabethan tragedy in Damon Krometis' new play, “When in Disgrace (Haply I Think on Thee),” a story of jealousy, love and betrayal among three suburban teens.
The show will have its regional premiere on Thursday at Walden Theatre, a training ground for young actors in Louisville.
Growing up in the age of Columbine gave playwright Krometis, 26, a unique perspective on adolescence. His new coming-of-age story, written in the blank-verse style of Shakespeare and his contemporaries, examines the tragic isolation of a generation he feels has been defined by violence.
Krometis mines his own recent past experiences in his plays, which deal primarily with themes of male adolescent identity. (Walden will host a discussion and reception with Krometis immediately following Saturday's matinee performance.)
“You have to start out with what you know,” said Krometis. “I know a little bit more about what it is to be a boy than a man.”
Alec Volz, Walden Theatre's associate artistic director, had been searching for challenging contemporary scripts featuring teenagers when he read an enthusiastic New York Times review of “When in Disgrace,” which premiered at the Theater at St. Clements in New York City last January.
He was sold first on the concept and then on the script.
“It's hard to find good scripts for teen actors that are not stupid, to put it bluntly,” said Volz, who also directs this production. “This is a good, solid play.”
Walden's production will star actors still in high school, while the New York premiere featured a cast of young adults. The experience those actors brought to the production was balanced by a certain amount of distance brought on by age.
“We all had to struggle a bit to remember just how potent certain emotions are at that age,” said Krometis. “To give teenagers the chance to explore the darker sides of what it means to be that age is a different sort of opportunity.”
Krometis well remembers the darker sides of being 16. That was 1999, the year his mother died and the year two teen gunmen killed 13 people at Columbine High School in Colorado. It was an incident that left permanent marks on the young writer and, he feels, his peers.
“I've always felt like those sudden outbursts of violence have defined my generation, but it was never something we could really talk about,” he explained. “I felt, in my community, a certain sense of fear about those topics. Columbine was remarkably similar, demographically and economically, to where I grew up.”
Four years later, while Krometis was home in suburban Maryland on break from James Madison University, tragedy struck a neighboring community when high school student Ryan Furlough poisoned a classmate. The story of “When in Disgrace” is loosely based on the crime, which haunted Krometis for years.
“It was interesting to look back at those years and feel like, had a couple of things happened differently, I don't know how differently I would have turned out from Ryan,” said Krometis, who serves as artistic director of the Examined Man Theatre in New York. “It's a much harder situation to judge in the end.”
Loss and grief have informed Krometis' work since the beginning.
While still in high school, he wrote his way through his own personal grief with his first play, “No Regrets,” about a father and son coming to terms with a mother's death. The play was staged at his high school in 2001.
“Theater became an integral part of my life in facing what happened to my mom,” Krometis said. “It became my sole grieving process, in many ways.”
Though many writers turn inward, Krometis embraces the vulnerability and communal experience of theater to tell his stories.
“I think there's something powerful about somebody standing up in front of a group of people saying, ‘I am not someone you would have liked, but this is who I am, and this is my story,'” he said.
