Alexandra López as Parker and Sadie Koopman as Ava. Photo by DJ Corey Photography.
“The Second Best School Shooting” is exactly what it is. If the title makes you shrink away, this play will be a challenge for you to get through. If the title doesn’t turn you away, it is no more shocking in performance than the title might suggest. As a person who grew up in the school shooting generation, I didn’t find it particularly upsetting as an audience member, but your comfort level may vary. NextStop Theatre’s current production is the US premiere of “The Second Best School Shooting,” after a development process last spring and an Edinburgh Fringe run. This two-hander is described by playwright Alice Stanley Jr. as “dark bubblegum,” and this production brings both the sugar and the stickiness.
…provides an accurate portrayal of the plight of children in this country and the world for which they are fighting—and that is worth watching.
The play follows a week in the life of Ava (Sadie Koopman) and Parker (Alexandra López), two high school juniors who survived a school shooting that happened the same day as a school shooting that killed fifteen people on the other side of St. Louis. The other school shooting hit the national news circuit, and a girl named Margo gained 100,000 new followers on her Instagram for posting content about her experience surviving it. The best friends fight through what it means to have experienced a trauma that was overshadowed by a similar event with a higher death count and what the lack of care for their experience ignites in them.
The girls were in physics when the gunman, David, initiated the school shooting. Luckily, Ron, a student who values gun rights, tackled David and the bullets only hit the ceiling. Ava and Parker wrestle with what it means to hate Ron and what he stands for, while knowing the lack of casualties was because of Ron’s actions. Parker studies for her physics test, and Ava fights to have her trauma recognized. As Ynika Yuag beautifully states in their dramaturgy note, “Coming of age in a country where adults sell their safety is a given circumstance; surviving this physics test while on a B/C cusp is the real challenge.”
Ava and Parker, along with the rest of their classmates, were given three days off of school to recover from the incident, and Ava ended up in Parker’s house because her mother didn’t want her home alone. Koopman was presented with an acting challenge in excess with this role. Ava feels everything, wants everything. In the moments between days, the production team, particularly Mo Oslejsek’s sound design and Hailey LaRoe’s lighting design, did some of the heavy lifting, but López offers enough variance in tactics to smooth over the sharp turns in Parker’s character.
The events of the play are contained to Parker’s bedroom which was wonderfully brought to life by Shartoya Jn.Baptise and Bridgette Tran’s intricate design. The main playing space was an elevated platform in a primarily alley configuration. There were audience members on all four sides, but eighty percent of the audience was on the longer edges. Director Heather Lanza blocked the show using the length to aid sightlines rather than the much narrower depth. I would recommend sitting in the longer seating sections for the best view.
Suspended school ephemera, including desks, lockers, and chairs, surrounded the platform. On the short sides of the platform were chalkboards where the timeline of the play was illuminated. The physical reminder of the day of the week (and how long it had been since the shooting) clarified the story and was a necessary piece of the production design. Parker’s bedroom was filled with evidence of teenage girlhood. Particularly notable were the gestures towards queerness through queer books on the shelves, pride pins, and quintessential queer music posters. Parker’s potential queerness was not addressed in the text of the play or the staging choices which left me with questions regarding both its heightened presence in the set dressing and its absence from the content of the production.
Imari Pyles’ costume design was another high point of the production that contributed to the understanding of the characters more than any other feature. Koopman’s Ava was outfitted with adjacency to a youthful femininity of bows and pastels. Parker spent the majority of the production in a marching band hoodie and Strawberry Shortcake fuzzy pajama shorts, painting a character overwhelmed by emotion so substantially that personal maintenance tasks fell to the wayside. Parker’s masculinity, through apathy and baggy clothes, met Ava’s polished girlhood in ways that tied Ava to the violence of White womanhood directly as the play continued. The costumes filled in the story where the script didn’t and telegraphed the reveals of the latter half of the script wonderfully.
This play highlights the destabilization of childhood and the inherent existentialism that comes with it. Then it asks if impulsivity or apathy is more dangerous to social movements, and this production gives a clear answer. Whether school shootings are just a part of your life or something that you avoided in high school, “The Second Best School Shooting” provides an accurate portrayal of the plight of children in this country and the world for which they are fighting—and that is worth watching.
Running Time: One hour and 15 minutes with no intermission.
Advisory: Discussions of gun violence and self-harm, strong adult language, shotgun sound effects. No depiction of gun violence.
“The Second Best School Shooting” runs through October 11, 2026 at NextStop Theatre, 269 Sunset Park Drive, Herndon, Virginia 20170. For more information and to purchase tickets, call the Box Office at 703.481.5930 ext. 1, email boxoffice@nextstoptheatre.org, or go online.
