Some years ago, I wrote a play called Spin. It was born from personal experience—grappling with loss, trauma, and the haunting aftermath of violence. But I didn’t want to write a play about politics. Not about the Second Amendment. Not about gun control or capital punishment.
I wanted to tell a story about people—about the long, often invisible threads of pain, grief, and unintended consequences that ripple outward from a single violent act.
Spin tells the story of two families whose lives are upended by a shooting. At the center are two characters: the woman, a victim of gun violence, and the man, the shooter. Surrounding them are the woman’s husband, daughter, and best friend—and the shooter’s son, Manny. What emerges is not a courtroom drama or a manifesto, but a quiet, layered meditation on how violence isolates, how it echoes, and how it binds the unlikeliest of people.
The woman becomes an invisible presence—forced to observe her family from beyond, powerless to intervene as her daughter grows and her husband falters. The man, sentenced and executed, never sees the pregnant girlfriend he left behind or meets the son born in his absence. Both are silenced, confined to the margins of the lives they helped shape.
Years later, the lives of these two families intersect once again—quietly, unknowingly. The woman’s daughter, Sam, and the man’s son, Manny, grow up in the same town. They become best friends. They fall in love. They begin to imagine a future together.
But when a local newspaper runs a story about Manny’s football success—mentioning the father he never knew—the buried past resurfaces. The woman’s husband, still raw from loss, tries to sever their bond. Manny is consumed by shame, grief, and inherited guilt. Sam is caught in the collision of love and legacy.
Throughout it all, the woman pleads to be heard—to comfort her daughter, to reach her husband, to stop the cycle. Her voice is never loud, but it is persistent. Steady. Human.
In time, Sam and Manny return to each other. They marry. When Sam becomes pregnant, she writes to the man on death row—offering him the forgiveness his son cannot yet give. After his execution, he spins into the unknown… only to find himself face-to-face with the woman. As she spins away into what’s next, he begins his own silent watch over the lives his actions changed forever.
This, to me, is the cycle of violence. A spin. Relentless. Generational. It only stops when we choose to stop it.
A Choice in the Spin
The murder of Charlie Kirk yesterday has elicited powerful, often polarizing emotional responses—from those who revered him and from those who reviled him. Most of the people speaking his name in grief or in scorn never knew him. They watched him from afar, drew conclusions from his words, and either found kinship in his rhetoric or recoiled in response to it.
I often found his rhetoric troubling—at times, deeply offensive. I did not share his vision of America or his view of the people who call it home. That hasn’t changed in the wake of his death.
But what has remained constant—and must remain constant—is my belief in his humanity.
Charlie Kirk was a person. He mattered to people. To his parents, his wife, his children, his friends, his followers. Whether or not I agreed with the ideology he championed, I can recognize his worth as a human being. That recognition does not require agreement. It requires empathy. It requires maturity. It requires us to see people not just as avatars of ideology, but as complicated, contradictory, imperfect humans—just like us.
We have grown reckless with our words. We speak with venom, tweet with vitriol, and justify our cruelty by pointing to someone else's. We say things not because they are right, but because they will sting. And in doing so, we reinforce the very cycles we claim to oppose.
We are spinning. Spinning away from one another. Away from civility. Away from compassion. Away from any shared sense of dignity or responsibility.
Death is inevitable. But death by violence is not.
Violence is a choice. So is compassion.
The cycle doesn’t break on its own. It breaks when someone chooses to stop spinning. To speak a different kind of truth. To remember the person behind the ideology. To choose grace over retribution. To forgive—not to forget, not to excuse—but to free ourselves from the endless, exhausting orbit of rage.
We all have that power.
We all have that choice.
Let us not forget to use it.
What a brilliantly written powerful piece.