The lights were off and the blinds were drawn throughout Eleanor Roosevelt High School in Greenbelt, Maryland. The students and their teachers were not sure where the threat was coming from this time, but they were told that it wasn’t a drill. Fin Davis was huddled with friends in a corner of the classroom, engaged in their usual lockdown routine—scrolling social media for updates from outside the building—when they noticed a handful of classmates next to them gathered in a prayer circle.
“The moment I was listening to that group of girls praying together, I was like, ‘There’s so much that I could say about this,’” Davis said, reflecting on that 2023 experience. “Because it’s one thing to list a bunch of information about how many people have died because of this, but it’s another thing to show people what it’s like in that situation.”
That’s what Davis aimed to accomplish in writing Gallows Humor, a play by Bethesda’s Round House Theatre and its Teen Performance Company. The production, which will premiere on Friday evening, is entirely run by students, from the director’s chair to the costume department. Typically, an adult writes the script for the TPC’s annual show and the students take care of the rest—Davis, at 18 years old, is the program’s first teen playwright.
“We rarely get to see things about this subject matter—performances, TV shows, just any type of content—that’s actually written and produced and directed by teens,” says 17-year-old Giorgia Toti (“Casey”), a senior at Montgomery Blair High School. “There might be input by teens, but normally it’s written by adults who haven’t actually gone through a situation like this.”
The teenage creators, cast, and crew of Gallows Humor know their way around the performance’s setting: inside a classroom during a lockdown. As the title lets on, the subject matter cuts deeper than terror—the work strives to explore the spectrum of everyday experiences that define modern-day adolescence, from soapy drama to moments of self-discovery to, well, the looming threat of a school shooting. “It’s just really all about how these moments aren’t totally black and white, tragedy and joy,” says director Lark Jeffers, a 15-year-old sophomore at Montgomery Blair High School. “It’s trying to find humor, because teens are really funny—even during the most unthinkable situation, we are still funny.”
Every TPC participant interviewed for this article had their own collection of lockdown stories to share. They all expressed a sense of frustration about guns in the US and voiced concerns over whether their schools’ lockdown procedures would actually be effective in the event of serious violence. They worry that sheltering in place will only make them easier targets, or that one of their peers—someone else who knows the classroom protocol—will perpetrate an attack. They feel sorry for their teachers, who have to take the lead in these situations.
“I just find it completely dumb that we’re still allowing this,” says Scout Amakali (“Charlie”), a sophomore at Albert Einstein High School. “I see it as, we’re leaving doors open that should have been closed a long time ago.”
Through their work on “Gallows Humor,” the students hope to get these grievances off their chests and into the minds of the adults in the audience. After a lockdown ends safely, “everything’s fine, everyone’s fine—but the texts I sent, the emotions I felt were still very real,” says 18-year-old Kenai Sanders (“Alex”), a senior at John F. Kennedy High School. The team hopes that dissecting this chronic anxiety onstage will move older viewers especially, many of whom finished school pre-Columbine and haven’t lived through a school shooting threat.
Davis drew a lot of inspiration from their own experiences of lockdowns during the writing process: “I would literally be around a bunch of people who were crying, and after trying my best to comfort them, I would be typing down what I need to remember about this, because I know if I don’t type it down, my brain is probably going to make me want to forget it.”
That point of view resonates with the actors—so much so, that it can occasionally be difficult to separate themselves from their characters. “It’s my first real time acting, so I feel like it’s a bit harder for me, maybe, to disconnect,” Sanders says. A day before the show’s designer run, Sanders’ school was locked down. “That was really hard.”
Even with emotions running high, the students are focused on avoiding sensationalism. Lighting designer Abby Graeff, an 18-year-old senior at the Nora School in Silver Spring, is taking a minimal approach to her role—she doesn’t want bright colors or flashy artistic choices to distract from the message at hand. “In this show specifically, my job isn’t to dramatize it, because it’s not a drama,” she says. “It’s not dramatic. It’s real life.”
Gallows Humor opens February 28 and runs through March 2 at Round House Theatre (4545 East-West Highway, Bethesda). Tickets are available now.
