In CoHo’s production of The Gun Show, the fourth wall is down, the script is onstage, the playwright is in the audience, and the actor playing the playwright is periodically having conversations with the playwright about the play. Unpredictable and absorbing, The Gun Show is, for all its ostensible complexities, a straightforward work with a minimalist set, one actor, and five autobiographical stories about guns. The stories progress from lighthearted to unnerving, and eventually to the story the playwright can’t work through or let go of, the one that’s always with her, “like I live inside a goddamn movie theater, like the movie theater lives inside my head, and there’s only one show.”
Written by playwright EM Lewis, a white woman who grew up in rural Oregon where guns were a part of daily life, and performed by actor/storyteller Vin Shambry, a black man who grew up in Portland, The Gun Show plays with expectations and preconceptions while attempting to think about guns in a way that goes beyond the current political debate. It asks the audience to consider, or reconsider, their positions on guns. And when the play ends, it asks them to talk about it.