Woonsocket’s RISE theater presents ‘An American History of Guns’
WOONSOCKET – The Rhode Island Stage Ensemble, in collaboration with Daydream Theatre Company, will present a new play that takes on a complex topic: “An American History of Guns.”
The playwright and director is Lenny Schwartz of Scituate, a native Rhode Islander and the founder of Daydream Theatre, which has been affiliated with Woonsocket-based RISE for about five years.
Schwartz says the play is neither pro nor con guns but is about two groups and a question: people who can’t imagine having a gun in the house, people who accept guns, and why one group can’t understand the other.
The setting is a college classroom where the professor – played by veteran Northern Rhode Island actor Michael Thurber -- is teaching the history of guns in America.
His lecture covers a lot of ground, starting in the 1600s when English soldier and explorer John Smith was instrumental in establishing the colony at Jamestown, Va.
The lecture touches on the gun-slinging days of the Wild West; on eras defined by conflicts including World Wars I and II; and on individual shooters, like the Marine veteran who, in 1966, took rifles to the top of a tower at the University of Texas at Austin and opened fire, killing 15 people and injuring 31. At the time, it was the deadliest mass shooting by a lone gunman in U.S. history.
The drama, Schwartz explains, centers on the students’ debates and the questions they ask, including what leads to a shooting – and who becomes a shooter?
“It’s like a whodunit,” says Schwartz. “The plot is about the different characters. It’s a very emotional show.”
Schwartz has been writing plays for 25 years and has directed productions in Rhode Island and New York City, “one or two times a year since 2008 …
off-Broadway, and off-off-Broadway.”
He began writing because, “I wanted to be an actor. So I wrote a play.” That was before college, during a summer math class. “At the end of the class, I got and A -- and had a script,” he says.
He says his first “real play,” was “The Scarecrow,” a personal experience about being anorexic, written a year before his 2000 graduation from Rhode
Island College. “That was performed in New York City, in Rhode Island and at different colleges.”
He’s been writing plays, graphic novels and screenplays ever since, on “whatever fascinates me,” he says. Several have been biographical, including Lucille Ball, the Marx brothers, and Bill Finger, who helped Bob Kane create Batman but wasn’t credited. That play is called “Co-Creator.”
In 2018, RISE presented Schwartz’s “Ditko,” about an illustrator who created several DC Comics characters but is largely unknown by anyone other than
comic book aficionados. The play also was performed in October 2019 at TheatreLab NYC. His current project is a film, “The Haunted and the Hunted.”
This week, however, his focus is on bringing “An American History of Guns” to the stage for the first time. He hopes the play will encourage audiences “to look at our own actions and to have a discussion.”
Performances of “An American History of Guns” are Thursdays through Saturdays, April 14-23, at 8 p.m. Tickets are $15 and available online at www. ristage.org or at the door.