A little over a year ago, Seth Kelly and Arlo Hastings, who were then sophomores at Lebanon High School, had written a play they were hoping to produce.

Because it was a Christmas play and their plan was to produce it in June, and because they thought it wasn’t very good, they decided to pivot to another subject, something with a social purpose. From a long list, they chose school shootings.

Of all the issues they could take on, they said, this is the one that most affects them.

“This was the one subject where we need to be heard,” Kelly said.

The resulting play, “377: How Many More Will It Take?” receives its first production this weekend, with shows on Friday, Saturday and Sunday in the Briggs Opera House in White River Junction.

The co-authors and directors suspect theirs is the first show of its kind, written and produced by teens who have grown up with “active shooter” lockdown drills.

This spring, Lebanon High School had what Hastings called, “not a drill.”

On March 15, the high school and adjoining Hanover Street School were locked down while police negotiated with a man who refused to get out of his truck outside the schools. He had four firearms with him inside the truck, authorities said.

“It was genuinely the most terrifying situation I’ve ever been in,” said Hastings, who was in the school during the afternoon incident.

Kelly had left the school, but received an alert about the lockdown. He immediately thought, “Oh, it’s a school shooting,” he said.

“The fact that it was my immediate first thought is problematic,” he said. It’s a sign of how prevalent the issue is.

The play’s title is drawn from the number of school shootings since the 1999 killings at Columbine High School, in Colorado. That figure has risen since the writing began, the authors said, and the production makes that clear to the audience.

The play is broken into two parts, before and after. The first act introduces students and their community, and concludes in violence, gunshots that ring out while the stage is blacked out. Hastings and Kelly strove to work with the issue without staging graphic violence.

The second act is about how the school and its community tries to pick up the pieces. In addition to students, the perspectives include a range of community members. The play has a cast of 25, all of them students from Lebanon, Hartford, Hanover and Oxbow high schools except for three college students who are from the Upper Valley. The crew of nine also includes three college students.

At a rehearsal Tuesday afternoon, a small crew of adults was on hand at Briggs Opera House to feed the cast and crew. The publicity for the show also has come from grownups.

Though the project is taking place outside the high school’s walls, Hastings and Kelly will receive course credit for the writing and production. And Emma Cooke, the chorus and theater teacher at LHS, has served as an advisor to the project for the past year. Her office door was always open to the co-writers, and she helped them set deadlines and stick to them.

“It’s a little daunting” when students want to write about such a fraught issue, Cooke said Tuesday. “If it’s going to be written about, it should be written by teenagers.”

Hastings, who lives in Grantham, and Kelly, a Lebanon resident who grew up mainly in Plainfield, spent a couple of months reading about the aftermath of school shootings before they started writing. Hastings read a long book about Columbine and watched court testimony. Kelly read Hanover author Jodi Picoult’s 2007 novel “Nineteen Minutes,” which describes a school shooting in a fictional New Hampshire town.

It’s not clear to Hastings and Kelly what sort of life the play will have beyond this weekend’s performances.

“We haven’t thought that anyone else would want to put on this show,” said Hastings, who uses they/them pronouns. The primary goal is to encourage adults to see how their decisions affect schoolchildren, they said.

There is no advance ticketing for the performances, and given the subject matter, Hastings and Kelly weren’t worried at first about having to turn anyone away. But word of the show has spread widely. Admission is by donation and proceeds will go to Sandy Hook Promise and Newtown Action Alliance, two anti-gun-violence organizations.

“Coming to see it and just understanding what is happening is important in and of itself,” Hastings said.

Performances of “377: How Many More Will It Take?” are slated for 7 p.m. Friday, 2 p.m and 7 p.m. on Saturday and 1 p.m. on Sunday in White River Junction’s Briggs Opera House.

Rock steady

The estimable Tuck’s Rock Dojo has been teaching Upper Valley kids how to kick out the jams for the past 15 years. That milestone seems worth celebrating, and that’s exactly what the Etna-based dojo, led by musician and teacher Tuck Stocking, plans to do. From 3 to 10 p.m. on Saturday, 18 acts with ties to the rock school will perform on two separate stages at Fairlee’s Lake Morey Resort.

Performers will include everyone from current students to established performers such as Brooks Hubbard, Hans Williams and Shy Husky. Alumni are coming in from Philadelphia, Montreal, Arizona and New Orleans. The bill also includes the Dojo All Stars, comprising 25 musicians who have the dojo on their résumés.

Best of all, admission is free, but bring some cash for the food trucks and band merch. For more info, go to tucksrockdojo.com.

The grass is bluer

When I see campers heading up Route 14 I know one of two things is happening: the annual World’s Fair in Tunbridge, or the Jenny Brook Bluegrass Festival. Since it’s June and not September, bluegrass it is.

If that’s your thing, then this event is kind of a local Super Bowl. The music starts Wednesday and runs through midday Sunday. Space limitations prevent me from naming all the acts, though I will say that several of them have “boys” or “brothers” or “mountain” in their names, and they’re all white.

Many people camp for the whole festival, but day passes range in price from $28 on Wednesday and Sunday to $75 on Friday and Saturday. For tickets and more info, go to jennybrookbluegrass.com.

If you’re looking for something a little more down home, Vermont stalwart Bow Thayer brings Choirs of Aether, a project that reinterprets the catalog of jazz luminary Sun Ra and deploys Thayer’s own work as a basis for improvisation, to the historic meeting house in Braintree, Vt., on Sunday. In addition to Thayer, the Choirs feature multi-instrumentalist Krishna Guthrie (great-grandson of Woody and grandson of Arlo) and percussionist Steve Ferraris, who performed with Sun Ra, Michael Ray and the Cosmic Krewe, Mike Gordon and many others. Opening for them, at noon, is the bluegrass four-piece Audrey Mae.

Sunday’s show is the first of the summer’s series of Braintree Bluegrass Brunches, held the last Sunday of the month and co-sponsored by Randolph’s Chandler Center for the Arts. They’re a bit out of the way, but with pay-what-you-can music, food and craft vendors on site and a bike ride series attached, it sounds like an outing. The meetinghouse is at 2756 Braintree Hill Road, Braintree, Vt.

Alex Hanson can be reached at ahanson@vnews.com or 603-727-3207.