Passage Theatre<\/span><\/a> playwriting group. It was really frightening to write. Thank goodness for my fellow playwrights (always!). It\u2019s easier to be bold when you feel safe<\/p>\nThe first productions were pretty intense. We didn\u2019t know what to expect. You know? What the audience’s reactions would be. The play is a little raw, and a little punchy, and a little close to home for almost everyone who sees it. I don\u2019t think there\u2019s a single person in America who doesn\u2019t have a personal experience with guns.<\/p>\n
In the very first production in Chicago at 16th Street Theater, directed by Kevin Christopher Fox, we worked together to craft a conversation with the audience that followed the show, inviting them to share their gun stories, in the wake of me sharing mine. And they did!<\/p>\n
The play has had more than fifty productions over the last decade. I\u2019ve been part of at least half of those, sitting there and waiting for the actor telling my story to point his flashlight at me, and say those words: \u201c…and when I say my story, I mean hers.\u201d It didn\u2019t really get easier to be part of those productions of the play\u2014open myself up to the intimacy of working with a new actor and a new audience. Being present. Being absolutely present. And open. Not hiding. Not anymore.<\/p>\n
I guess that what\u2019s changed in my relationship with the show is me. I wrote it because I needed to write it. I wrote myself into it because, I guess, I somehow knew that the writing alone wasn\u2019t going to do the trick\u2014give me that gift of transformation that I yearned for, though perhaps I didn\u2019t know if I deserved. And it worked. I\u2019m here, my whole, messy, honest self, on the other side of hundreds of performances. I\u2019m not doing the duo version as often anymore. Maybe\u2026 maybe I\u2019m ready to let it go<\/p>\n
Nate: <\/strong>I love all that. Watching you watch the play was always the most fascinating part of it to me. When we were working on it for close to a year and a half, it was really powerful to see how your engagement with it changed. For the first week or two of our initial run in Portland, I remember feeling very protective of you. Shawn and I talked about both wanting to be there because we had the impulse that we wanted to be able to stop the show at some point if it was going a certain way.\u00a0 <\/span>By the time we were touring in Europe, it felt like you were sharing the emotions out instead of fighting them off.<\/p>\n\nWhat the play does, which I continue to believe in and feel is necessary, is reject mindless, simplistic, binary side-taking in favor of thoughtfulness, complexity, storytelling, story listening, and embracing the fact that we\u2019re all in this together.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n
Ellen: <\/strong>I\u2019m grateful for your protectiveness, even if you never had to fight anyone for me.<\/p>\nNo one ever has come after me for talking plainly about guns. We had a guy in West Virginia who shared that he had his gun on him at the post-show conversation, which TJ Young, our moderator, took in stride with remarkable aplomb. I remember a couple coming up to me one night and telling me I hadn\u2019t changed their minds one bit, and they were keeping their guns. A few folks\u2014in different cities, different productions\u2014told me that my husband would have found another way to kill himself if he didn\u2019t have a gun. That\u2026 hurt.<\/p>\n
But what happened much more frequently was someone putting their arms around me and telling me about the person they\u2019d lost to gun violence\u2014suicides and accidents and murders. I\u2019ll never forget the woman sitting beside me during the show in Chicago one night, who reached over and took my hand during the fifth story.<\/p>\n
What the play does, which I continue to believe in and feel is necessary, is reject mindless, simplistic, binary side-taking in favor of thoughtfulness, complexity, storytelling, story listening, and embracing the fact that we\u2019re all in this together. That seems more urgent than ever.<\/p>\n
Nate: <\/strong>This was something my students brought up. A lot of them felt really uncomfortable in a good way, in the way I think the play is trying to achieve, with some of the \u201cpro-gun\u201d talking points. I hesitate to call them that, since I think a huge and fundamental purpose of the show is to move past the binary of \u201cpro-gun, anti-gun\u201d, but the talking points that stem from the \u201cpro-gun\u201d side of the political spectrum. One of them talked about the fact that she had grown up in New York City, had never seen a gun in her life, and didn\u2019t know anyone who owned one. The girl sitting right next to her, who was a friend of hers, said, \u201cOh, my dad has six,\u201d and she was totally shocked.<\/p>\nThis was something I know I struggled with hugely in my own relationship to the piece. I have pretty strong feelings about gun violence in the United States and have done a substantial amount of activism work around gun control, so having to sit with this play was something that took some concentrated effort on my part.<\/p>\n
As part of our original production in Portland, we collected \u201cGun Stories\u201d from people in our community. One that really affected me was something a carpenter (John) at Artists Rep in Portland told us. He\u2019d grown up on a farm in rural Idaho (I think it was Idaho?), and he and his younger sister had to walk almost a mile to get to the main road to catch the bus to school. One winter when he was ten or eleven years old, his parents started noticing cougar tracks in the snow in the mornings following him and his sister out to the main road. This is a part of the world where cougars are a major safety concern, and a hungry full-grown cougar could absolutely attack and take down a couple of elementary school kids. But because of their work schedules, his parents weren\u2019t in a position to walk him and his sister to the bus stop every morning, so they called the school. The solution they came up with was for him (John) to carry a shotgun with him as they walked out to the bus. When they got to the bus he would hand it off to the bus driver, who would in turn give it to the vice principal to lock up in his office during the day. When they got back off the bus at the end of the school day the bus driver would give him back the shotgun, and he\u2019d carry it across his chest as he and his sister walked back up the road to their homestead.<\/p>\n
This story blew my mind. It was so far removed from my own lived experience growing up in the vast urban sprawl around Chicago that I sort of didn\u2019t know what to do with it.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n