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Synopsis
In The Gun Show, award-winning playwright E.M. Lewis tells the story of America’s relationship with guns through the prism of her own personal experiences. She starts during her youth in a rural farming community where she learns about guns from her dad, has her first date with a special person at a shooting range, and then, as life's journey takes her to 'big cities' like Los Angeles and New York, finds herself in more complicated, less upbeat, and sometimes dangerous, gun situations. Using a light, often hilarious touch, Lewis takes us across the wide social and political terrain of America's most dangerous pastime with brutal honesty and keen understanding. Leaning neither right nor left, The Gun Show jumps into the middle of the gun control debate and asks, “Can we just have a conversation about this?”
In related news....we invite you to consider this patron's Letter to the Editor of the Des Moines Register which explains it about as well as anything else we could say:
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The Company
ACTING - TheatreMidwest: Burst, Atlas of Mud, When the Messenger is Hot. Ivy Theatre Company (NYC) Co-Founder: A Real Boy (59E59), Reach, Mill Fire, Outside/Inside, The Perfect Wife, Like Poetry (LaMaMa), Incongruence, Black Ice. The Secret Theatre (NYC): The Taming of the Shrew, The Tempest, A Midsummer Night's Dream, Mrs. Warren's Profession, Romeo and Juliet, Edward II, The Spanish Tragedie. Shakespeare Forum (NYC): The Scarlet Letter, Romeo and Juliet. Workshop Theater (NYC): Acting: Full Frontal. Directing: Turtles & Bulldogs, After, Vowed & Wowed, Food for Thought. FILM - Wherever You Go Pictures (NYC): Unpacking. EDUCATION- Gregory Abels Training Ensemble, NYC, Certificate. Simpson College, Iowa, BA Theatre Arts.
Kate Kanne
Technical & Graphics SCENIC DESIGN – Atlas of Mud (TheatreMidwest) Young Frankenstein, Last Five Years, The Hobbit, HMS Pinafore, Illusions, Rumors, (Anon)ymous, Les Liaisons Dangereuse. OTHER TECHNICAL: TheatreMidwest: The Gull, A Tragicomedy for One, After Chekhov; The Gun Show.
COMPANIES/VENUES: TheatreMidwest, Colorado Shakespeare Festival, Prairie Repertory Theatre (SD), Highland Theatre (MN), George Daly Theatre (IA) BUSINESS: Central College - Theatrical Design Faculty Member; USITT Northern Boundaries-Board Member. EDUCATION - Minnesota State University, Mankato – MFA Design. South Dakota State University, Brookings - BA Theatre. |
DIRECTING: The Gun Show Theatre Midwest; Mina, A Vampire Kiss in the Plague of 1666 and The Witlings First Flight; Romeo & Juliet and She Stoops to Conquer Bergen Community College; Stray Cats Blue Roses TOURING (ONE-WOMAN SHOWS): Love Arm’d, Aphra Behn & Her Pen: Bedlam Theatre (Edinburgh, Scotland); Cheer from Chawton, (her play about Jane Austen)- Stockton, CA, Pleasantville, NY, Players Club (NYC); Mission Theatre (Bath, England)—and multiple visits to Mission for Jane Austen festival, culminating in a one week repertory run of Love Arm’d and Cheer From Chawton. Dozens of presentations of these pieces at colleges and theatre festivals around the USA, often with additional workshops. OTHER ACTING: New York-Kings County Shakespeare Company: Midsummer Night’s Dream, The Tempest and Twelfth Night. Hudson Classical--Hamlet, Pride and Prejudice, The Three Musketeers, The 2017 Many Faces of Love Valentine Monologue Festival, The Importance of Being Earnest; Theater Ten Ten--Innocent Diversions; MTB Studios The Madwoman of Chaillot, Vital Signs, Strawberry, Samuel French Festival Regional credits: Indiana Repertory Theatre: Great Expectations; Cornell University Resident Acting Company: The Rover, The Cherry Orchard; The Shakespeare Theatre (Washington, D.C): All’s Well That Ends Well, The Merchant of Venice and USC:The Three Sisters, Summer and Smoke; Film: Modern Love. MEMBERSHIPS-AEA, SAG-AFTRA, Dramatists Guild, WRITE ON! Playwriting Group, League of Professional Theatre Women , Blue Roses.
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E.M. Lewis is an award-winning playwright, teacher and opera librettist. Her work has been produced around the world and is published by Samuel French/Concord Theatricals.
Lewis received the Steinberg Award for both How the Light Gets In and 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, the 2016 Oregon Literary Fellowship in Drama, and an Edgerton Award for her epic Antarctic play, Magellanica.
Plays by Lewis include: How the Light Gets In (Steinberg Award winning play that premiered at Boston Court Pasadena in 2019), Apple Season (which received a rolling world premiere from the National New Play Network in 2019), The Gun Show (which has had more than 40 productions across the country and at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in Scotland), Song of Extinction, Heads, Infinite Black Suitcase, Reading to Vegetables, True Story, Dorothy’s Dictionary and You Can See All the Stars (a play for college students commissioned by the Kennedy Center).
Sherlock Holmes and the Case of the Fallen Giant, a new opera commissioned by American Lyric Theater that Lewis wrote with composer Evan Meier, had its academic premiere in 2023 at Portland State University and its professional world premiere at Opera Modesto in 2024. Town Hall, her opera about health care in America, created with composer Theo Popov, was produced at University of Maryland and Willamette University.
Lewis is currently working on a variety of projects, including a big new play called The Great Divide, commissioned by the Oregon Shakespeare Festival as part of their American Revolutions program, co-commissioned by Artists Repertory Theater. Lewis received a six-year National Playwright Residency from the Mellon Foundation to support her work.
Lewis is a proud member of LineStorm Playwrights and the Dramatists Guild. She lives on her family’s farm in Oregon.
Lewis received the Steinberg Award for both How the Light Gets In and 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, the 2016 Oregon Literary Fellowship in Drama, and an Edgerton Award for her epic Antarctic play, Magellanica.
Plays by Lewis include: How the Light Gets In (Steinberg Award winning play that premiered at Boston Court Pasadena in 2019), Apple Season (which received a rolling world premiere from the National New Play Network in 2019), The Gun Show (which has had more than 40 productions across the country and at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in Scotland), Song of Extinction, Heads, Infinite Black Suitcase, Reading to Vegetables, True Story, Dorothy’s Dictionary and You Can See All the Stars (a play for college students commissioned by the Kennedy Center).
Sherlock Holmes and the Case of the Fallen Giant, a new opera commissioned by American Lyric Theater that Lewis wrote with composer Evan Meier, had its academic premiere in 2023 at Portland State University and its professional world premiere at Opera Modesto in 2024. Town Hall, her opera about health care in America, created with composer Theo Popov, was produced at University of Maryland and Willamette University.
Lewis is currently working on a variety of projects, including a big new play called The Great Divide, commissioned by the Oregon Shakespeare Festival as part of their American Revolutions program, co-commissioned by Artists Repertory Theater. Lewis received a six-year National Playwright Residency from the Mellon Foundation to support her work.
Lewis is a proud member of LineStorm Playwrights and the Dramatists Guild. She lives on her family’s farm in Oregon.
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