Alice Stanley Jr. brings The Second Best School Shooting to the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, a bold new play at Pleasance Courtyard. Blending dark humour with emotional depth, the production explores one of the most pressing issues of contemporary American life.
Drawing on lived experience as a teacher and developed with input from young people and survivors, the play offers an unflinching yet human perspective on trauma, identity and growing up in the shadow of violence. It uses satire to open up conversation around a subject often avoided.
The Second Best School Shooting runs from 5–30 August (not 12, 19, 26 August) at 12:45 at Pleasance Courtyard (Baby Grand). Tickets are available here.
You are the writer of The Second Best School Shooting at Pleasance Courtyard, what can you tell us about the show?
The show is a dark comedy about a pair of best friends struggling to process surviving a school shooting that is overshadowed by a much worse school shooting on the same day.
The play tackles an incredibly urgent and sensitive subject through dark comedy. How did you find the balance between humour and the weight of the themes?
I recognise it sounds messed up, but the school shooting epidemic in the United States has become so outrageously awful, it has somehow become almost inherently comedic.
Guns are the leading cause of death for US children, and our politicians essentially shrug about it. Sometimes they argue students should just get bulletproof backpacks or teachers should have guns too.
I mean, sorry, those bizarre “solutions” are objectively stupid and therefore kind of hilarious, and therefore simultaneously incredibly depressing.
I also think there’s inherent dark comedy to addressing basically any topic through a teen perspective. This piece aims to mirror how modern teens really talk about guns.
And like most thoughts erupting from teen brains, those words are a messy swirl of tortured and hysterical.
The story is inspired in part by your experience as a teacher. How did those real-life insights shape the narrative and characters?
I spent four years in Chicago teaching public school before I became a full-time artist.
I was first inspired to write this play back then, noticing how my students talked about school shootings with a certain ‘lol’ flair versus how our elders did, with a certain spineless flair.
The characters in this play began as a collage of sick and beautiful sentiments my former students shared with me.
You worked with young people and survivors during development. What did you learn from those collaborations, and how did they influence the final piece?
I am endlessly grateful to everyone who has helped me develop this work. Every time I read a draft with young people, they enhanced the themes, the slang and definitely the specifics.
This play is about the micro-traumas we make our youth endure in exchange for our right to bear arms.
When I first started this project, I expected a lot of young people would relate. However, throughout the development process, I’ve learned almost every Gen Z person in America has, at least, light trauma from drills and scares alone.
When there’s space for them to discuss school shootings, teens will casually mention such devastating details. I’ve heard so many stories of students being locked down for hours or having pre-written “I love you” emails in their drafts ready to send at the first gunshot.
I’ve tried to weave all these tragic anecdotes into the play.
I am, of course, especially thankful to the survivors who have given me feedback on the text. They always offer invaluable insight, and it’s a relief when they tell me all the parts that made them laugh.
Extra special appreciation to the youth-led gun advocacy group March For Our Lives for working with me over the years to make sure the play’s messaging is as honest and effective as possible.
The play explores what it means to feel unseen in a media-saturated culture. What conversations are you hoping audiences will take away from the show?
Social media can make us hate each other and ourselves. By design.
In theory, Instagram, TikTok, Twitter and others all have the amazing capability to bring us community and progress, but the billionaires who own those platforms aren’t the biggest cheerleaders of either.
Social media is definitely a tool for social change, but as Audre Lorde once said, “The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.”
So I hope this play argues for the importance of being present with the people you’re actually in a room with.
What would you say to anyone thinking of booking to see The Second Best School Shooting?
If you come to our show, you’re going to see incredible performances from our phenomenal cast Shaylaren Hilton and Jordan Hull.
You’re also going to sit in a room and laugh with strangers about horrible sh*t. At first it might feel kind of wrong, but by the end, it will feel really, really right.
