APRIL 13-APRIL 29, 2017
THE GUN SHOW BY EM LEWIS
A REGIONAL PREMIERE
OR CALL 720-583-3975
1245 Champa Street, Denver 80204
7:30 pm Thursday-Saturday
"It's a fascinating and often-painful journey through gun culture — an anodyne phrase that masks the many shades of nuance in how Americans feel about guns. " CHICAGO TRIBUNE
"...the story is human, bold, sometimes funny, sometimes heartbreaking, but always honest. " Mary Kroeck, Newcity Stage
From a farming community in rural Oregon to the big cities of Los Angeles and New York, playwright EM Lewis takes aim at her own relationship with firearms in “The Gun Show.” An actor shares Ms. Lewis’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?”
Director
Susan Lyles
Susan Lyles, is an award winning director with an BA from Wichita State University, and received certification from The London Academy of Music and Dramatic Arts in Shakespeare. She has worked on stage in London, Chicago and Denver and has also worked in film, commercials, print, industrials, and voice over. Susan is the founder and Producing Artistic Director of And Toto too Theatre Company, and has directed more than 20 plays, including the award winning Naked in Encino, Car Talk, and Heads. She has designed costumes for more than 50 plays, including Lion in Winter (Denver Victorian Playhouse), 12th Night (Denver Victorian Playhouse), and Greater Tuna and Christmas Tuna (Denver Victorian Playhouse, Town Hall Arts Center). Susan was recently honored with a 2015 True West Award. She also owns the award winning film production company, Ruff, Ruff Dog Productions.
Set/Sound Design by Darren Smith
Stage Manager Carol Timblin
Starring Mark Collins
Playwright
E M Lewis
E. M. Lewis is an award-winning playwright, teacher, and librettist. Her work has been produced around the world, and published by Samuel French. She received the Steinberg Award for Song of Extinction and the Primus Prize for Heads from the American Theater Critics Association, the Ted Schmitt Award from the Los Angeles Drama Critics Circle for outstanding writing of a world premiere play, a Hodder Fellowship from Princeton University, a playwriting fellowship from the New Jersey State Arts Commission, and the 2016 Oregon Literary Fellowship in Drama. She was a finalist for the Shakespeare’s Sister Fellowship in 2014. She has worked with theater companies and arts organizations across the country on her plays, including the Lark, the William Inge Center for the Arts, the Ashland New Plays Festival, Page 73, and many more.
Lewis’ play Now Comes the Night was part of the Women’s Voices Theater Festival in Washington DC last year, and was published in the anthology Best Plays from Theater Festivals 2016. The Gun Show premiered in Chicago in 2014, and has since been produced in more than a dozen theaters across the country, including Coho in Portland. It has upcoming productions scheduled in Richmond, Denver, Washington, DC, and at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in Scotland, and will be published in the upcoming anthology The Best American Short Plays 2015-2016.
Two of Lewis’ newest plays will be on stage next year: Magellanica will have its world premiere at Artists Repertory Theater and Apple Season will have its world premiere at New Jersey Repertory Theater. Her other plays include: Infinite Black Suitcase, The Study (aka Reading to Vegetables), True Story, and You Can See All the Stars (a play for college students commissioned by the Kennedy Center). She is currently working on an intimate play set in an Oregon vineyard called Wine Country, and a big, new socio-political play called The Great Divide.
Lewis is working with composer Evan Meier on a full-length, family-friendly opera commissioned by American Lyric Theater called Sherlock Holmes and the Case of the Fallen Giant. She has other opera projects in mind and in progress as well!
Lewis teaches playwriting on a semi-regular basis — most recently an Intro to Playwriting class at Lewis & Clark College in Portland, Oregon. She is looking forward to a five week residency in spring of 2018 at Southern Illinois State University at Edwardsville.
Lewis was born and raised in rural Oregon, and has recently returned to the beautiful Pacific Northwest. She lives on her family’s farm, where she writes full time, travels regularly with her theater work, teaches occasionally, and drives tractor whenever she feels like it. She is a proud member of the Dramatists Guild.
Cast
Mark Collins
Mark Collins is pleased to be back working with And Toto too, where he previously appeared as Ken Tynan in the world premiere of “Lost Creatures.” Other recent credits include Michael in “God of Carnage” and Johnnypateenmike in "The Cripple of Inishmaan" at Miner’s Alley Playhouse; Uncle Peck in square product theatre’s “How I Learned to Drive,” Wesley in “Jerusalem” at The Edge Theater, and Roy Disney in “A Public Reading of an Unproduced Screenplay About the Death of Walt Disney” with The Catamounts. Mark dedicates his performance in “The Gun Show” to Jeff S. and Angie F.
The Gun Show is supported by
