(Photo courtesy Dr. Phillips Center for the Performing Arts)
ORLANDO | Following the 10th anniversary of the Pulse tragedy, a one-night benefit performance on June 14 of “The World May Be Flat” will raise awareness about the long-term mental health needs of the survivors.
Showing at the Dr. Phillips Center for the Performing Arts, the play explores the difficult questions surrounding remembrance, grief, and what happens after public attention fades. Proceeds will support Central Florida LGBTQ+ youth programs.
The cast and crew are small with Celestino De Cicco as Noah, Weston Kemp as Jagger and director Roy Hamlin. Written by Orlando playwright Chip Byers, the intimate two-character drama explores survival and everything that comes after.
Created from a Pulse survivor’s experience, the play follows Noah, a survivor living in Orlando as he struggles to process trauma, grief, and the increasing pressure to move on ten years later. Now in a relationship with Jagger, a younger partner shaped by a very different cultural and political reality, Noah finds himself caught between the life he lost and the one he is trying to build.
Byers says the play is set entirely in their apartment, the play unfolds through sharp, emotionally charged dialogue blending humor, tension and vulnerability as the two clash over LGBTQ+ identity, politics, memory and what healing actually looks like.
“I intentionally did not use any real people because we’re not trying to make a reenactment,” Byers shares. “We’re not trying to be, by any means, trying to exploit Pulse. We’re not trying to put tragedy up on stage… The show is set 10 years later, and it is showing this as a survival of Pulse… We give voices to many of the different struggles that they come up against, including cultural and political arguments.”
Rather than revisiting the tragedy itself, “The World May Be Flat” focuses on the aftermath: the disorientation of being unable to forget while everything around you moves forward, and the burden of carrying grief in a culture where many believe there is a “correct” way to mourn.
Byers says it was important to show “The World May Be Flat” at Dr. Phillips because after the tragedy, there was a temporary memorial on the outside lawn.
“That’s where we brought our flowers, that’s where we held the memorial services, right after the shooting,” Byers explains. “I wanted to get back to that same space…. It felt really meaningful to me, and I wanted to do it there.”
The project was shaped in part by Byers’ graduate work in cultural heritage management at Johns Hopkins, examining how communities navigate difficult and contested histories.
The piece will ask audiences what it really means to survive and what healing looks like when the world has already decided, Byers says.
“The show is 100% definitely about Pulse, but it does have a universal message about coming together after traumatic events, and I hope it does reach people beyond those who are just immediately affected by Pulse,” Byers says.
For more information, visit DrPhillipsCenter.org.
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