‘More Guns!’ aims too high at NRA target
If in San Francisco you mount a satirical musical about the NRA, a crucial test of your artistic and comedic ambition is whether you’re shooting your fish in barrels or on an open range — whether you go for the obvious jokes sure to garner a smile or you aim higher, wider and wackier.
“More Guns! A Musical Comedy about the NRA” often looks beyond lowhanging fruit. The show, visiting Z Below from the Second City Hollywood for a threeday run, has
both NRA members and “woke” liberals in its crosshairs. It doesn’t paint its central gun lobbyist, Ron Barkley (Andrew Pifko), as a fullon nut, easy to laugh at and loathe. When he sings amazing lyrics like, “You’ve got at least one thing in common when everyone has a gun,” or, “Everyone is safe from everyone when everyone has a gun,” it comes from a human place. His alleges that his wife wouldn’t have been killed in a mugging if her own purchase of a handgun hadn’t been held up by backgroundcheck laws.
But if “More Guns!” aims to complicate rather than corroborate your stereotypes, that laudable effort chafes against the satirical musical form. The show, written by Philip Labes and Michael O’Konis, keeps asking you to care about the broken relationship between Ron and his teen daughter, Christina (Marnina Schon), a safe space seeking, privilegechecking lefty. Their life together is all microwave dinner sand thwarted conversations, and“More Guns !” can render their sadness only in the broad strokes of a thousand other parentchild disconnects.
The lack of originality and character development wouldn’t grate so much if the show merely used it as scaffolding, a launching pad for something else. But “More Guns!” keeps wading into emotional thickets for their own sake — thickets it hasn’t taken the care to flesh out.
When “More Guns!” breaks free of its paintbynumbers structure, it shows its real potential. Directed by Zach Siegel, the charmingly scrappy show uses just four cast members, a keyboardist (O’Konis) and a panoply of hastily donned and doffed costume pieces on an almost bare stage.
Among that cast, Caroline Thrasher triumphs in a variety of ensemble roles, especially as Bushmaster, Ron’s boss at the NRA whose love of firepower veers carnal. In the space between one line and the next, she’s a whirlwind of gestures and expressions, each fully embodied but then promptly discarded, as if it were no big deal, a throwaway. She might stretch her jaw into a clown mask’s frown then furrow her brow into the doomsday glower of an angry god, then reel herself in, as if to say, “That went a little too far, didn’t it,” then react to her last reaction. She exemplifies how a stage actor’s performance isn’t hermetically sealed behind a fourth wall but in communion with its audience, as responsive to the everchanging atmosphere in the theater as the reagent in a chemical reaction.
Music offers the felicity of catchy melodies whose form supports content. In a song called “Liberal Love,” in which Christina and Wolf (Labes) marvel at how great it is to be two high school students in love and in agreement about everything within their liberal bubble, the pair tiptap their way through the title words as if they’re as delicate and powdery as freshly fallen snowflakes.
In the brilliant opening number, which has the final letter in “NRA” become the first syllable of “amen,” Dahlya Glick’s onpoint choreography makes hands clasped in prayer seamlessly metamorphose into hands in the shape of a gun.
As human and recognizable as Labes and O’Konis try to make their show, “More Guns!” succeeds most when it distorts and exaggerates, when it finds new, funhouse expression for just how unreal American discourse about guns has become.