Following the February 14 shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, in Parkland, Florida, student survivors wasted no time mobilizing their fight for gun control through the Never Again movement and capturing the nation’s attention. It turned out that many of the leaders were active in the school’s theater program, a fact that was “utterly unsurprising” to Alicia Senior-Saywell, the program director for the Belmont Theater District.
Senior-Saywell and Wishcamper say the idea started with Daniel Burns, who graduated from Stoneman Douglas in 2008. Burns, an actor now based in New York, has kept in touch with the school’s drama director, Melody Herzfeld, over the years, and he credits her as being a major reason why he decided pursue theater. When she told him she wanted to maintain her drama room as a home for the students, many of whom didn’t want to return to school, he felt it was his duty to give back and help.
“My hope in doing this was that upon coming back to school they would feel the love and that this wasn’t just yet another day back at school after this tragedy, that this was the start of an entirely different chapter. And it is a chapter full of love,” Burns says.
