One day in 2018, I arrived at Playwrights Horizons in New York City excited to see a new play by Lindsey Ferrentino called This Flat Earth. I did not know much about the story aside from the fact that it had teenage actors playing teenager characters, but I quickly realized that it was about two teens trying to make sense of a recent mass shooting event as their school. The most striking part of this experience was watching Ella Kennedy Davis playing a thirteen-year-old white girl named Julie who takes out her anger, grief, and confusion about this senseless violence on those around her. Davis spent much of the play on the emotional limits of anguish, screaming, crying, and shaking to the point where she continued to do so throughout the curtain call. Both my discomfort with the actor's obvious distress, and my genuine dislike for the whiny, sad, one-dimensional role—whose main characteristic is her ignorance of previous school shootings—were enough to distract me from the play itself. But what created this distancing effect? I first thought of Bert O. States's phenomenological observation that children onstage often break our illusion of the theatrical world, but I noted that my phenomenological response was distinctly different from what I feel when I see children acting onstage. Instead of wondering if the actor understood the play she was in, I instead feared she understood all too well.

中文翻译：

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无尽的掩饰能力：在美国舞台上代表少女，从《儿童时光》到《如果漂亮会伤害丑陋一定是个混蛋》

2018 年的一天，我到达纽约市的剧作家地平线，很高兴看到林赛·费伦蒂诺 (Lindsey Ferrentino) 的一部新剧《这个平坦的地球。除了青少年演员扮演青少年角色之外，我对这个故事了解不多，但我很快意识到这是关于两个青少年试图理解最近发生的学校大规模枪击事件的故事。这次经历中最引人注目的部分是观看艾拉·肯尼迪·戴维斯扮演一个名叫朱莉的十三岁白人女孩，她发泄了对周围人这种毫无意义的暴力行为的愤怒、悲伤和困惑。戴维斯在剧中的大部分时间都在痛苦、尖叫、哭泣和颤抖的情感极限上度过，以至于她在谢幕过程中继续这样做。我对演员明显的痛苦感到不舒服，而且我真的不喜欢这个爱发牢骚、悲伤、一维的角色——她的主要特点是她对以前的校园枪击事件一无所知——都足以分散我对戏剧本身的注意力。但是什么造成了这种距离效应呢？我首先想到了伯特·O·斯泰茨的现象学观察，即舞台上的孩子常常打破我们对戏剧世界的幻想，但我注意到我的现象学反应与我看到孩子在舞台上表演时的感受截然不同。我不是想知道演员是否理解她所演的戏剧，而是担心她理解得太透彻了。