NEW YORK.- Playwright Donald Rupe did not intend to write a musical about the massacre in club night Press Orlando, Florida. He wanted to write about his friends. But the more she dug, the more she returned to the 2016 trauma of his city.
“The Pulse connection wasn’t really planned, but if I was going to write honestly about myself and my friends in that time period, it would be disingenuous not to talk about how it affected us,” Rupe says from Orlando.
What the playwright has created is the powerful and moving From Herewhich explores the complex feelings and reactions of the community in the days after a lone gunman killed 49 people at an Orlando gay club.
The musical, which will hit Off-Broadway this summer, centers on Daniel, a thirty-something with a tight-knit group of queer friends who navigate life, insecurity, and relationships with humor and kindness. Daniel has a tortuous relationship with his mother.
“It is and is not about Pulse,” Rupe says. “We don’t even mention Pulse for the first 45 minutes of the play. But then, just like it happened in real life, once that moment intersects with everyday drama, it changes everything. That’s intentional because that’s how it felt here “.
The memory
The deadliest attack against the LGBTQ community in the history of the United States left 49 dead and 53 injured on a day when the Latin Night in the club. Gunman Omar Mateen was killed after a three-hour standoff with members of a SWAT team. He had sworn allegiance to the Islamic State.
At the time, it was the worst mass shooting in modern American history. But that figure was surpassed the following year, when 58 people were killed and more than 850 injured among a crowd of 22,000 at a country music festival in Las Vegas.
From Here debuted at the 2019 Orlando Fringe Festival and has had some limited performances in central Florida and a concert version in New York. It lands at The Pershing Square Signature Center in Manhattan on June 27 and runs through August.
While Rupe didn’t lose any close friends in the massacre, actor and singer Blake Aburn, who plays Daniel, did. In each performance he relives the horror, but points out that he is also telling a story about love and acceptance.
“It’s really cathartic, to be honest with you. The Pulse tragedy was very hard for me and it was a difficult time for everyone in Orlando,” he says.
“The story ends on a high note and Daniel feeling hopeful. So it’s easy to go through it that way, to think about the emotions instead of the tragedies,” he added.
The massacre
Rupe has lengthened, reshaped and edited the musical since it debuted as a 15-minute performance at the Fringe Festival. She says she wanted to tell a story that was deeply personal in a way that was respectful but also meaningful. The audience is never taken inside the nightclub, but rather feels the aftermath of the shootings.
While the play is based on Orlando’s experience, Rupe believes it can be appreciated by any community that has suffered mass trauma, especially places rocked by gun massacres, such as Newtown, Connecticut; Blacksburg, Virginia, and Uvalde, Texas.
“I think a lot of people now, unfortunately, have a connection to shared trauma or shared pain, whether it’s from senseless gun violence or something widely experienced like the pandemic,” Rupe says.
For Omar Cardona, a veteran of The Voice who plays Ricky, who is Daniel’s romantic interest, the massacre is: “too close to home.” He was born and raised in Orlando, and one of his best friends was murdered that night.
“It’s a huge responsibility, a gigantic responsibility, for us to be able to portray him and portray him honestly,” Cardona says. “The tears just flow.”
The first song in the play after the shooting is When Angels Fallwith the powerful lyrics: “The world stopped moving — frozen by a disapproving God/When angels fall, the city walls all disappear/We’re all from here” “angels fall, city walls disappear / We are all from here”).
Rupe and the cast hope the musical can lead to healing or a shared understanding of a dark time. She can also tell what can happen to a city torn apart by senseless gun violence.
“It’s a story that needed to be told because, yes, we will always continue to remember and we will never forget those we lost, but I feel like we needed something to close this story and put it into the ether,” Cardona says.
Source: AP
