'Erabus' Conveys Key Concerns of Gun Violence and Teen Suicide

Joel Beers
4 days ago
6 min read

The play, onstage at the Hollywood Fringe Festival, was written and directed by O.C. School of the Arts faculty, and is being performed by OCSA students.

Brylee Hsu, left, and Kendall Wei performing in OCSA's upcoming production of “Erabus and the Fall of the Sparrows.” Although its themes deal with teen suicide, bullying, domestic abuse and mass shootings, "Erabus" is designed to reach out to anyone who may feel isolated or hopeless. Photo courtesy of Allen Joncas

The play is directed by one of the most accomplished professional stage and screen actors to ever work in Orange County. It is written by the county’s most prolific and produced playwright. But “Erabus and the Fall of the Sparrows,” which opened Sunday as part of the sprawling Hollywood Fringe Festival and will run four more times June 17 and June 21, would not exist were it not for the students in the acting conservatory of the Orange County School of the Arts.

Unfortunately, it also would not exist if teen suicide, bullying and mass shootings were not at the forefront of those students’ minds.

“Erabus” borrows elements from Greek tragedy, but its emotional and topical concerns first manifested in the early stages of a summer acting workshop in 2022 at OCSA, initiated by conservatory director John Walcutt. The workshop was built around the concept of devised theater, a collaborative form of theater-making in which, instead of starting from a pre-written play, an acting ensemble co-creates a piece through a series of improvisations and acting exercises designed to uncover emotional truths rooted in the performers' own ideas, experiences and discoveries.

It’s theater from the ground up, and while no one had any idea what kind of play it would develop into – or the impact that on-campus productions later in 2023 and last year would have – at least one student-actor in this current production isn’t surprised by its weighty concerns.

“I think it’s just the reality of our times,” said Sofia Malone, 16, who just finished her sophomore year, about the play’s heavy issues. “With social media we are exposed to all these ills of the world and we see the same story happening over and over again with gun violence. And every time it’s like ‘thoughts and prayers for the victims’ and then nothing really changes and then the next one happens and we’re like ‘Oh my God, thoughts and prayers go to the victims.’ And that’s it.

“And it’s just scary going to school not knowing if it’s going to be us. So I’m not surprised. There’s been suicide and domestic abuse and bullying for a long time, but I think gun violence is like the most relevant, rising issue for people of (my) age.”

But “Erabus” isn’t just a play in which those issues are brought up just to bring them up, Malone said. “These things aren’t brought up in some cheesy way. It shows you what is going on in the minds of these characters, what they are really going through. And it shows you other people have had these thoughts, or that they’re going through them now. And if you are feeling them, that you’re not alone and maybe you won’t feel as isolated.”

Developing the Play

Walcutt, an actor and director with a lengthy stage and screen résumé, was asked to begin OCSA’s acting conservatory 11 years ago. Part of his job was to develop the curriculum, including choosing plays that exposed fledgling actors to a variety of work. But one thing he found lacking were plays written for that age group that were relevant and reflected what students were truly feeling. So, in order to produce a play that featured the prerequisite elements – a large cast that could be gender-bended, a minimum of swearing – but also one that reflected students’ real-life concerns, he decided to create one.

“Most plays written for high schoolers are really terrible, so I wanted to create a summer workshop that gave students the opportunity to do good acting but also the opportunity to do something important that would cover topics that they really cared about,” Walcutt said. “So we started with a bunch of improvisations and, of course, everybody tried to be funny at the start. But the (2022) mass shooting in Texas was still on their minds, and they eventually landed on the idea of school shootings and teen suicide, two things that were both in their consciousness.”

During the third week of the workshop, William Mittler – who has had some 40 plays produced at Stages Theatre, Fullerton College, the Curtis Theatre, and other O.C. and Los Angeles theaters, and who had worked with Walcutt at Shakespeare Orange County in 2019 and had since started teaching at OCSA – was invited in to observe and help lead. Then the workshop took a two-week break, and Mittler was tasked with creating a draft of a play – still without any plot to go on.

While he didn’t have a framework to wrap a play around, Mittler had plenty of inspiration to draw from: the emotions and truths manifested by the students during the process. He let those “collage in his brain” and within two weeks returned with a draft of a play that involved one character who is driven to suicide by bullying, but whose spirit returns in the second act hoping to avert a mass shooting triggered by her suicide’s fallout.

The play was further workshopped, and “we were really proud of what we had come up with by the end of that summer,” Walcutt said. “So I contacted the school and said we’ve got this really wonderful project that had a real message to it, to reach out and help people be aware of people who might feel isolated.”

At first, school officials were reluctant to produce a play that included subject matter that might trigger or otherwise make students uncomfortable. But Walcutt assured them that though it deals with dark themes, “it’s also a play full of love and hope that also talks about the reality of this endless cycle of gun violence we have. So it's really beautiful and really cool and not as dark as it sounds. And they said, ‘Well, we’d love to do that at the school.’”

The company of “Erabus and the Fall of the Sparrows.” “Erabus,” the Greek word for darkness, was developed in a devised theater workshop at the Orange County School of the Arts in 2022 and received on-campus productions in 2023 and 2024. It runs two more weekends at the Hollywood Fringe Festival. Photo courtesy of Allen Joncas

Beyond the Walls of the School

After two successful productions on campus, Walcutt believes it’s time to move it to the Hollywood Fringe Festival for two reasons: to give OCSA students the opportunity to feel what it’s like to be involved in a production in the epicenter of the entertainment industry; and to hopefully prolong its life.

“I do think it should have a life elsewhere, especially in schools, because it requires no technical demands and it is powerful and often very funny,” Walcutt said. “There are moments that break the tension and the stress and the actors do an amazing job making it all work.”

Malone has experienced the impact – first as a viewer two summers ago and last year as a participant.

“I know everyone who I’ve talked to that’s seen it has been moved really deeply,” she said. “I have friends who have had suicidal thoughts or have abuse at home and they said that this play really spoke to them because it portrayed them in a way that wasn't cliché or performative. They had a genuine connection to the characters and it helped them feel seen. So I hope that it kind of provides some comfort to people, to kind of see themselves reflected and see that people care about these issues.”

But the play carries another message, Malone believes – one aimed at audiences beyond a school campus. “What makes this play truly special is that it has such a potential for social justice outreach,” she said. “It’s not fair that high schoolers have to think of mass shootings all the time. We should be thinking about our grades, what colleges we're going to go to, or classic teenage girl stuff like ‘What am I going to wear to the prom?’ We shouldn't be thinking about gun violence.

“So this also allows us to speak out about things, and I hope that the adults in the audience watching, the people who have the power to vote, see that things don’t have to be this way. They can be changed.”