When an affluent teenager from a Denver suburb fled her home to join ISIS in 2014, her arrest at the Denver airport made national news. Today, Shannon Conley is serving a four-year prison sentence after pleading guilty to conspiring to aid a terrorist group. Her case elicited a troubling question for Selina Fillinger, a Northwestern junior when Conley was arrested: Why would a well-off, educated white girl born and bred in the United States, want to join a terrorist organization?
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“She had to be crazy, right?” says Fillinger. “I mean, what else could possibly have made her do it?” But as Fillinger dug deeper into the story, she came up against a disturbing fact: Conley wasn’t alone. “There are over 250 U.S. teenagers who have tried to do the same thing,” Fillinger says. “They can’t all be insane. Something else has to be going on.”
The murky world of a teen aspiring to be a terrorist forms the backbone of Fillinger’s play, “Faceless.” Opening in previews Jan. 26 at Skokie’s Northlight Theatre, the drama puts audiences into the world of 18-year-old Susie Glenn, a well-off, white teenager who is on trial for conspiring to commit acts of terrorism.
Fillinger has now graduated from Northwestern, but “Faceless” scored a spot in Northlight’s 2017 season while she was still a student. When Northlight Artistic Director BJ Jones gave her the news over coffee, it took Fillinger a minute to grasp it. She’d been expecting feedback on the play, not a full production staged at one of the most respected regional theaters in the country. “I literally did not understand what he was saying,” Fillinger recalls. “He had to say it a few different ways.”
The conversation might have been startling, but Fillinger has been on a playwriting fast track for years. She’s a two-time winner of Northwestern’s Agnes Nixon Award, which provides staged readings and a cast prize to the winning student playwright. An earlier work — “Three Landings and a Fire Escape”— netted Fillinger the Judith Barlow Award, which includes a $2,500 prize and a New York workshop.
“Faceless” is also already an award winner. The piece won a 2016 Edgerton Foundation New Play prize, which came with enough money to fund extra rehearsal time at Northlight. Long before the Edgerton, however, Jones already recognized Fillinger as an artist of major potential. Through Northwestern’s Next Step Working Commission, Fillinger was paired with Northlight for a year-long play development process. Usually that process culminates in a workshop or a reading. Not this time.
“I never thought of Selina as a student. I think of her as a peer,” says Jones. “The language in ‘Faceless’ is elegant, but it’s also punchy. It’s thought-provoking. The story is incredibly, incredibly timely.”
However, the motivations that have driven hundreds of rich white teens to try and join terrorist groups won’t be neatly explained.
“It would be irresponsible for me to say I had an answer for that,” says Fillinger. “But I do think there is a general trend. What I’ve noticed in my research is this: Many of the people who end up being radicalized are people who have felt rejected, lonely, isolated or unimportant. And that makes sense to me. If you’re starving for affirmation, and somebody hands you just that, why wouldn’t you take it?
“I think we have an obligation to look at the pain,” she says. “For a long time, I kind of stayed away from international news because it made me so sad, and it made me feel helpless. But writing this play, telling this story, this is something I can do. We need to keep looking, even when we don’t have the answers.”
Northlight Theatre presents, ‘Faceless’
When: Jan. 26-March 4
Where: North Shore Center for the Performing Arts, 9501 Skokie Blvd., Skokie
Contact: www.northlight.org