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Agni: Drama Kids
by Kate Williams

AGNI Magazine

“Drama Kids,” by Kate Williams, is brief but potent. It’s a short story look at teenagers in drama—a class or club, it doesn’t matter—and how they straddle maturity and childhood. This story is special because of the images Williams uses to draw her characters and the world they inhabit. Williams doesn’t offer any protection for her characters or her readers. We are forced to deal with the brutality of these kids’ lives where what’s common for them is horrifying for us. It doesn’t matter that this story is set in a school or that its characters are actors, kids who love games of pretend. It all might look silly, but that just adds to this story’s edge. As readers, we’re forced to confront a dark set of juxtapositions where emotional violence is hidden by the roles played by kids, the roles played by people.

The teenaged actors in “Drama Kids” live in a messy world. They aren’t kids, protected by their parents; they aren’t adults yet either. Instead they’re something in between, people grappling for meaning as they spend their lives playing different games. The narrator talks about their lives: “And we are fucking around. We smoke pot during the intermission of the spring musical, sneaking away from the milling audience, returning to our marks dizzy-headed, velvet-happy. We get sick on vodka, can’t touch it after that. We give and receive blowjobs in the narrow costume room.” There isn’t an explanation for these characters’ behavior; there doesn’t need to be. The narrator is describing her life, not trying to explain it. Then we have another character, the girl who got an abortion: “We search her face for hints (the suck of the vacuum, the scrape of the knife), but her eyes are shuttered.” They know what’s happening; they know how dangerous and ridiculous their lives are, and those perils compel them to cling to memories of childhood.

When they’re bored at night, they return to their youth. The narrator observes, “And when we have nothing to do, we still stay out all night, swinging on the twisty gates of our old elementary school playground, the air thick with tangled lilacs and the weight of a predicted storm.” They run to their playground where they hope for safety, even as they anticipate oncoming danger. These small comments add a great deal to Williams’ story. There is fear, but there are no solutions.

But there is no answer, no quick fix. The narrator tells us, “I squint, trying to glimpse the people in the audience, wondering what expressions their faces will have. But the stage lights shine in my eyes, and all I can see is row after row of shifting silhouettes.” There is the world of drama and her comrades, but there isn’t safety from the outside, from emotional emptiness. The adult world has failed; it can’t connect with these kids and their problems. But that doesn’t lead to the reader’s pity because these characters aren’t weak. Some of them survive, and some of them don’t, but the beauty of this story is contained in Williams’ language, the way her characters don’t plead for sympathy. They don’t hide; her characters don’t hide.

Read it for yourself and let us know what you thought of the story.

About the Reviewer
Jeremy Trimble is a graduate student at Sacramento State University in California. He is a writer working on his first novel.

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