Anton Chekhov’s advice to playwrights – “If in the first act you have hung a pistol on the wall, then in the following one it should be fired. Otherwise don’t put it there” – finds its real-life counterpart in playwright E.M. Lewis’ short work, The Gun Show (Can we talk about this?) playing at Quantum Theatre through March 3.
Her version can be paraphrased, “If you keep a gun in the house, somebody’s likely to use it.”
The play is autobiographical, her experiences living in a world where firearms were commonplace, accepted and sometimes fun to play with. At this unusual and horrifying time in Pittsburgh, when guns have taken center stage, The Gun Show sharpens the focus on their role in American society.
Quantum’s decision to stage Lewis’ work, which will play in three locations and include an audience discussion, couldn’t be timelier. The play avoids politics and history by staying personal and specific to the author’s experiences. No fingers are wagged in our faces. We aren’t bogged down with statistics, or made to listen to arguments—pro or con—about control or freedom.
Instead we are faced, as Lewis was, with a figurative gun pointed at our face and asked, “How does it make you feel?”
The Gun Show is an hour-long monologue with the male actor Andrew William Smith standing in for the female playwright who is part of the show (as a member of the audience the night I attended at the Carnegie Library’s Homewood Branch). This curious tandem was confusing at first until we figure out that Smith is playing Lewis who plays herself. Got it?
Andrew William Smith presents The Gun Show manuscript
Back to the play. As Lewis, Smith recounts five stories that capture her ambivalence about guns. Three are pleasant memories of her early life in rural Oregon “50 miles” from a police station, making guns necessary for self-protection. Another account is a sort of courtship between her and the man she would marry as he teaches her how to shoot.
But Lewis heard the dissenting voices from people she labels the “granola-eating, Rachel Maddow-watching” liberals who wanted all guns banned. There were no choices between left and right, she believed.
Smith, a veteran of several Quantum productions and a professor of acting at Carnegie-Mellon University’s School of Drama, opens up what could have been a static presentation with movement and expression. He has little to work with. The stage is bare except for a desk and chair and a notebook of pages that he consults from time-to-time, as though to refresh his memory.
But the gunpowder-filled idyll turns darker as the play moves on to its fourth story, an armed holdup at a bookstore where Lewis worked the evening shift. She carefully builds the tension, as the cozy store turns more and more menacing when a customer erupts into a rage-filled insistence that Lewis turn over the cash, using his pistol as a deadly threat.
While no one is hurt, the experience rattles Lewis profoundly as Smith effectively portrays her fear–but does it change her mind about gun control?
“The conversation [about guns] is still not happening,” she insists, but it is one she is trying to prompt with her play. Her final story (no spoilers) might have that effect. It’s an emotionally draining ordeal, performed powerfully by Smith. The Gun Show” ends not with a bang, mercifully, but with a heart–felt plea for tolerance and cooperation.
Directed with careful understanding by Shelia McKenna, another Quantum mainstay, “The Gun Show” moves to the Allegheny West campus of the Community College of Allegheny County, 808 Ridge Ave., from Feb. 20-24 and the Tull Family Theater, 414 Walnut St., Sewickley, Feb. 27-March 3.
For ticket information and performance times: 412-362–1713 or www.quantumtheatre.com
Photo Credit: Jason Snyder
Bob Hoover retired from the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette as its full-time book editor and drama editor in 2011 after 28 years with the newspaper. He continued to write part-time for the PG reviewing books, theater, and articles on literary, historical and local topics until 2014. Hoover has reviewed myriad entertainment productions from the circus to children’s theater in Pittsburgh, New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, and Canada. As a book editor, he reviewed an average of 50 books a year, wrote regular columns on the local and national literary scene and organized and edited the newspaper’s weekly book section. He provided extensive coverage of Pittsburgh’s literary community as well as reporting on events, readings, and festivals around the country. Hoover was a theater journalism fellow at the Annenberg School of Journalism at the University of Southern California and the winner of state and local writing awards.
Categories: Archived Reviews