A new play from a Central Florida playwright examines trauma, grief and recovery through the eyes of a survivor of the Pulse nightclub shooting. On June 12th, 2016, ten years ago this week, a gunman killed 49 people and injured dozens more during a three-hour early morning standoff at the LGBTQ nightclub south of downtown Orlando. Lives were changed forever, and a community, in many ways, still grapples with the aftermath of the tragedy.
So, writing a play featuring a Pulse survivor – even a fictionized character, as this one is – could be fraught. Even controversial. Many people have strong feelings about how Pulse should be remembered and what memorialization should look like.
But playwright James “Chip” Byers is clear that his two-person play “The World May Be Flat” does not re-enact the night or focus unwanted attention on real people. In fact, the play, premiering Sunday at the Dr. Phillips Center for the Performing Arts, is set in the present, ten years after the tragedy. It examines how survivors of trauma struggle with finding their own individual path forward, while attempting to heal in the sometimes-unforgiving glare of the public eye.
Personal inspiration
Byers is a long-time disability advocate and a state-appointed disability consultant for cultural accessibility who has studied playwriting in New York. He said the play was inspired by recent conversations with friends who are Pulse survivors.
“One of those friends reached out to me and told me that [he] really hadn't been okay since the shooting,” Byers said. “I did not realize the emotional trauma that they were carrying.”
Byers felt humbled by that realization. He felt like he, along with the rest of the community, may have “moved on” from standing with Pulse survivors when support was still needed. Worse, he felt like some of the ways he had been offering support were actually causing some harm, once his friend told him that he often felt pressure from other people’s expectations of what grieving “should” look like.
Byers said one example is “tributes and memories that we would bring out once a year, that would paint the survivors as these heroes and strong members of the LGBTQ-plus community, who are supposed to represent strength and resilience.” While well-intentioned and even healing for some survivors and victims’ family members, Byers said, others feel like “they're not allowed to process their trauma, they're not allowed to feel grief.”
"Allowed to be imperfect"
Byers’ play was in part born of his desire to allow people still struggling with trauma to feel seen and validated, no matter what their grieving looks like. “They're allowed to be imperfect, they're allowed to have short tempers, they're allowed to be miserable, they're allowed to occasionally act inappropriately, because they just can't control what's inside of them, because that is the truth of living with long-term trauma,” he said. “They are allowed to be themselves.”
The play follows two characters. Noah is a fictionalized Pulse survivor, whose stories are influenced by the experience of Byers’ friends who survived that night. Jagger, Noah’s slightly younger boyfriend, has no connection to Pulse but tries to help Noah work through his lingering grief. The two love each other, but they represent different answers to the question of how a person moves forward after tragedy.
“Do we move forward, accept that this happened, and just try to be better in the future,” asked Byers, “or does part of us stay behind and always live at Pulse, and keep that memory and existence alive? And the answer is going to be different depending on who you ask, and again, both are completely valid answers.”
“Pulse isn't something that happened 10 years ago,” Byers added. “It is something that we are still living with today…the story is continuing.”
