BANG BANG

By Kat Sandler

Lila, a young Black ex-cop, has been on leave from the police force ever since she shot an unarmed Black youth. She’s moved back in with her mother, Karen, and is drinking beer for breakfast. So when Tim, a white playwright, shows up at her door to casually inform her that his play inspired by her experience is being adapted into a movie, Lila’s trauma is dragged out for speculation once again. The star of the film, their ex-cop bodyguard and Karen are pulled into the fight, leading to an epic metatheatrical standoff in a living room play about a living room play about gun violence, police, art and appropriation.

This dark, fast-paced dramedy by the author of Punch Up and Mustard traces the responsibility we have as artists in storytelling and the impact of what it means to be inspired by true events.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Playwrights Canada Press
• Release date: Nov 19, 2019
• ISBN: 9781770919846

Kat Sandler

Kat Sandler is a playwright, director, screenwriter, and the artistic director of Theatre Brouhaha in Toronto. She has staged seventeen of her original plays in the last eight years, including Yaga and the concurrent double bill of The Party and The Candidate, where the same cast raced back and forth between two theatres to perform two simultaneous plays. Her play Mustard won the Dora Mavor Moore Award for Best New Play and BANG BANG was nominated for the same award. Kat is a graduate of the Queen’s University Drama Program and is based in Toronto.

Book preview

9781770919822.jpg

Also by Kat Sandler

Mustard

Punch Up

BANG BANG

By Kat Sandler

Playwrights Canada Press

Toronto

BANG BANG © Copyright

2019

by Kat Sandler

First edition: November

2019

Jacket design by Marta Ryczko

Author photo © Joseph Michael Photography

Playwrights Canada Press

202-269

Richmond St. W., Toronto, ON M

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416-703-0013 :: [e-mail] :: www.playwrightscanada.com

No part of this book may be reproduced, downloaded, or used in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, except for excerpts in a review or by a licence from Access Copyright, www.accesscopyright.ca.

For professional or amateur production rights, please contact:

Emma Laird, at the GGA

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The Esplanade, Suite

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, Toronto, ON M

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416-928-0299, [e-mail]

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

Title: Bang, bang / by Kat Sandler

Names: Sandler, Kat, author.

Description: First edition. | A play.

Identifiers: Canadiana (print)

20190098619

| Canadiana (ebook)

20190098627

| ISBN

9781770919822

(softcover) | ISBN

9781770919839

(PDF)

| ISBN

9781770919846

(EPUB) | ISBN

9781770919853

(Kindle)

Classification: LCC PS

8637

.A

5455

B

36

2019

| DDC C

812

/.

6

 — dc

23

Playwrights Canada Press acknowledges that we operate on land, which, for thousands of years, has been the traditional territories of the Mississaugas of the Credit, Huron-Wendat, Anishinaabe, Métis, and Haudenosaunee peoples. Today, this meeting place is home to many Indigenous peoples from across Turtle Island and we are grateful to have the opportunity to work and play here.

We acknowledge the financial support of the Canada Council for the Arts — which last year invested $

153

million to bring the arts to Canadians throughout the country — the Ontario Arts Council (OAC), Ontario Creates, and the Government of Canada for our publishing activities.

The Canada Council for the ArtsThe Government of CanadaOntario CreatesThe Ontario Arts Council

Contents

Foreword by Donna-Michelle St. Bernard

Author’s Preface

A Whole Bunch Of Notes On Punctuation And Overlapping Dialogue

Note On Pace

Note On A Couple of Jokes

Note On Music

Characters

Setting

Act 1

Act 2

Your Face From BANG BANG

Acknowledgements

About the Author

Landmarks

Cover

Title

Copyright Page

Table of Contents

Start of Text

Foreword by Donna-Michelle St. Bernard

Author’s Preface

Act 1

Act 2

Acknowledgements

About the Author

Page List

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Foreword

by Donna-Michelle St. Bernard

You know this one. Or maybe you don’t.

There’s so frigging much going on, always.

She is annoyed and he cannot see it.

He has a foot in his mouth and he keeps shoving it deeper.

They don’t have all the information necessary to make sense of the mess they have stumbled into.

There is a song and a sandwich.

The thing about a Kat Sandler play is pacing. You must read this quickly, as if it were already slipping through your fingers, breakneck and pell-mell, aloud if at all possible. You must read it straight through without stopping so that every moment climbs atop the scaffolding of the ones before, all of it constantly threatening to topple. (Despite having vocab up the wazoo, I have yet to see the word tentative in any draft of a Kat Sandler play.)

The effect is cumulative, a building tension mounted on a stack of things that could have been said — that could still be said at any moment — and which would change everything if said. The effect is a straight line from A to Z from which one is constantly pulled aside by occurrences that cannot go unremarked. In this way the seemingly insignificant — an offhand remark about a cookie — sheds light on the pivotal. It’s not about what is being said, but the fundamental world view inadvertently revealed, which one now realizes informed all that was said before.

That is at the heart of this play: how one can learn to say all the right things without necessarily ingesting the values implied, the hard living at whose cost those right things have come by. One can tell a story at whose core are Black people and still centre whyteness by positioning that core as spectacle, anomaly or anthropological subject. This is a function both of lens and target audience. This is the inch that is a chasm between a story that is about a community and one that is from a community.

One aspect of the imbalance captured by Kat is the sheer weight of constant teaching upon marginalized communities. We don’t watch the playwright, Tim, receive a diatribe on what he should have done differently. Instead we are privy to the playwright’s confident assertion that he has taken all of the right steps to skirt charges of exploitation. No easy course of action is offered. Instead, the playwright is perpetually rediscovering his ignorance. The misstep is made clear to him from the nonplussed reception, or by simply hearing himself speak stumblingly in the presence of Black people the things that he has said easily in rooms where they were absent. Again and again, we see the way that characters are affected by awareness of the scrutiny they are subject to.

I have heard it said that laughter brings us together. Sitting in the theatre with an audience, laughter arrives at first in waves, coming upon us by surprise, together. Then, after a while, it comes haltingly, as we reach the point where we are unsure whether we should laugh at all. There’s a body on the floor, so to speak. This is heavy. But the laughter still surprises us, comes involuntarily, defying polite efforts to suppress. Then it comes in patches; some of the jokes are not for all of us. Some of us suspect that the joke might be at our expense, and we look around the audience, wondering if they can see us seeing ourselves, if we are marked by the experience that confers affinity with the body on stage. There seems to be general consensus that this guy is a bit of a dick. If I related with him a moment ago, before I knew what he was, am I a bit of a dick, too?

Some of us don’t laugh because we suspect the joke is built on a core truth too close to the bone to be funny; the wound has not yet healed, and we worry that those laughing are entertained by our trauma. And then the moment has passed and we’re not sure we can put a finger on the thing. We’re in the next moment and it is objectively funny, but the suspicion has taken root and we fear complicity. We can see and feel who is laughing, and at what.

This is one of the play’s powerful effects: it makes us aware of each other, of how we are experiencing the same story differently, of why that might be the case. We are forced into an awareness of our differing contexts with the benefit of a media barrage constantly exploiting and amplifying those differences.

This is a play about a whyte playwright who is unmindful about the ethical boundaries of voice, written by a whyte playwright mindful of the boundaries of voice for an arguably whyte audience (and also some who aren’t) who may not be versed in in-community conversations about ethics, boundaries or voice (and also some who are).

This is funny play for folx who like to laugh.

This is a thoughtful play for folx who like to think.

This is a skillful study in external gaze.

A quiet, domestic scene. A knock on the door. An unexpected visitor opens a still-healing wound. Competing interests turn the world upside down.

It goes quickly. The thing happens faster than you can say what it was and we are already onto the next thing. But we’re left with the feeling of the thing that happened, a strong impression that much was left unsaid and that we could fill in those gaps if we had the range. The entanglements of these characters, painstakingly constructed for the purpose of coming apart, show us the inch that is a chasm between learning and comprehension, between research and lived experience.

The audience is