Playwright Jennifer Barclay was inspired to write Ripe Frenzy in 2015 when reporter Alison Parker and cameraman Adam Ward were killed on live television by a shooter who recorded the act with a worn GoPro.

A professor of theater at the University of Maryland and mother of two at the time, Barclay took on the task of interrogating mass-shootings in the American context. After reading A Mother’s Reckoning (memoir by Sue Klebold, mother of one of the Columbine shooters) she went on to write Ripe Frenzy at the MacDowell Colony where Thornton Wilder had drafted Our Town years before, and she speaks to how its narrative informs her own text. “[His play] depicted the supposedly quintessential American town at the time. And my play is looking at the mass shooting epidemic as being a new norm in America, using ‘Our Town’ as a framework to look at questions about that new normal.”

Barclay is a proponent of the No Notoriety Campaign, listed below, which focuses on how we report on and talk about shootings. Of the play’s content, she says, “It becomes this frenzy that is contagious, a sense of competition and a sense of standing upon the previous shooter’s shoulders, which I think is happening in concert with how quickly news spreads now and how sensationalized the news can be."

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