July 2008
The idea for Split Ends came to me during April last year, after watching the events unfold on the news of the Virginia Tech killings. Viewers were left with the images of two particular ‘victims’: the shooter, and the girl who supposedly triggered the shootings after ending some sort of brief relationship with him. I wanted to explore what happened up to that terrifying climax between these two young people but without being at all derivative, hence my choice to keep them as nameless characters. This represents the changeable and unknowable nature of people and how one cannot entirely personalize two people we never really get to know or who never really get to know each other. It is essentially about the identities people create for themselves in front of others. This is also illustrated through the fragmented and non-linear structure of the play, as we are transported through snippets of the young man’s recollections.
