'The Gun Show' Casts Nonpartisan Eye on Gun Control Debate in Los Angeles

After its world premiere in Chicago this summer, The Gun Show, playwright E.M. Lewis's theatrical grappling with the gun control debate, is now on stage at Moving Arts in Los Angeles through December 14. Darin Anthony directs.

The Gun Show is an unusual kind of solo show in which an actor, here Chuma Gault, assumes the role of "The Playwright" and "takes aim at [Lewis's] own relationship with firearms." The actor presents the actual playwright's "unique perspective and true stories about America's most dangerous pastime as if they were his own, with brutal honesty and poignant humor. Leaning neither right nor left, The Gun Show jumps into the middle of the gun control debate, and asks 'Can we have a conversation about this?'"

The New City Stage review of the Chicago production noted Lewis's presence during the performances and the interaction between the actor and the silent playwright, as a result of which "the audience is constantly made aware that Lewis didn’t write a piece of fiction. Her autobiography of guns is being acted out in front of them and the story is human, bold, sometimes funny, sometimes heartbreaking, but always honest."

Born and raised in rural Oregon where, for many, gun ownership is a treasured right, E.M. Lewis now lives on her family's Pacific Northwest farm after spending some years in Los Angeles and New Jersey. She has developed work at a number of locales including PlayFest Santa Barbara in California and Emerging Artists Theater in New York City. Her plays include Song of Extinction, Infinite Black Suitcase, True Story, Heads, Reading to Vegetables and Goodbye, Ruby Tuesday. She received the 2012 Fellowship in Playwriting from the New Jersey Council for the Arts and the 2010‐2011 Hodder Fellowship at Princeton University. Heads won the 2008 Primus Prize from the American Theater Critics Association.

"We have a problem with guns in America," Lewis writes in The Gun Show. "The problem is we really, really like them." It's true all across the U.S. The Gun Show moves to Passage Theater in New Jersey in January 2015.