The Second Best School Shooting – Pleasance Courtyard ★★★★

The most remarkable thing about Alice Stanley Jr’s The Second Best School Shooting is that it understands exactly what not to write about. This is not really a play about a school shooting. The shooting is the event around which everything revolves, but Stanley Jr is far more interested in the space left behind afterwards: the jokes, the arguments, the social media posts, the boredom, the homework, the grief and the guilt. Rather than staring directly at violence, she examines the strange shapes it leaves behind in ordinary lives. The result is one of the sharpest new plays at this year’s Fringe. The premise is brilliantly uncomfortable. At the same time that Ava and Parker’s school experiences a shooting in which nobody is killed, another nearby school suffers a massacre that leaves fifteen students dead. While their school closes and their community processes the trauma, Ava becomes increasingly fixated on a disturbing question: why are those victims receiving all the attention? Why…