DNA Literary Elements

Drama; Thriller; Dark Comedy

English

The play is set in a street, a field, and a forest near an unnamed UK secondary school.

There is no narrator.

The tone is grave and occasionally comic; the mood is sinister.

While there is no overt main character, Leah is the closest character to a singular protagonist. The primary antagonists are John Tate, Cathy, and Phil.

Leah's major conflict is whether she can continue to associate with Phil after learning about his sociopathic indifference to other people's feelings.

The play reaches its climax when members of the friend group discover that Adam has been surviving for weeks in the woods. Phil remedies the situation by ordering Cathy and Brian to suffocate Adam so he doesn't expose their conspiracy.

Leah’s thoughts about the differences between empathetic bonobos and sociopathic chimpanzees foreshadows her decision to leave Phil, who appears incapable of empathy.

There is an example of understatement when John Tate insists, "Everything's fine" as Lou and Danny panic over their involvement in Adam's death.

The teens' action of throwing stones at Adam until he ostensibly dies is an allusion to death by stoning, a capital punishment method that involves a group of people throwing stones at a condemned person until the person dies.

In an example of visual imagery, Kelly injects tension into the play by having Phil put a plastic bag over Brian's head to demonstrate how to suffocate someone: "PHIL places the bag over BRIAN’s head. … He pulls the handles back around his neck and to opposite corners, making it airtight. BRIAN is giggling inside, looking around and breathing the plastic in and out of his mouth."

Leah's inexplicably violent killing of her innocent rodent pet, Jerry, is analogous to the group's killing of Adam.

Kelly uses the device of dramatic irony when Phil instructs Cathy to oversee Adam's suffocation with a plastic bag. Taking advantage of Brian's medication-induced obliviousness, Phil demonstrates how Brian should hold the bag tight over Adam's head, calling it a "game." While the audience knows of Phil's murderous intentions, Brian believes he is really taking part in a harmless game.