Undone by a gun

The final show of Curious Theatre Company’s 25th season focuses on the horror of — and American preoccupation with — guns. There’s never a weapon on stage, and yet guns have never been more intensely felt. This one-woman play delivers its points succinctly and intelligently. It strikes emotions of fear, devastating loss and vengeance without ever being predictable.

Influenced by the 2012 murders of 20 children and six staff members at Sandy Hook Elementary, Martin Zimmerman’s 75-minute monologue On the Exhale is a captivating study of a mother undone by loss. When a senseless act of violence takes her second-grade son in a school shooting, this college professor of women’s studies takes her grief down a dark path.

The play begins with the mother (Dee Covington) describing an encounter with an angry male pupil that compounds her fear and paranoia of a mass shooting happening at her university. Sadly, her fears are confirmed, although not by a shooting at her school, but rather at her son’s.

With the loss of Michael, she is alone (he was conceived by sperm donation). She has no close friends because he was her entire world. Her distant sister is flighty and unsupportive. With no resources on which to call, her very existence shatters. She begins to obsess over the mass shooting and wants to know exactly what happened in that classroom. This leads her to purchase the same model of assault rifle used in the massacre.

Still reeling from the loss, she goes to the gun shop intent on confronting the “merchant of death” who sold the rifle to the killer. What she finds is a shop owner who more closely resembles a “placid grandpa.” She surprises herself when she buys the rifle after firing a few rounds at the shooting range at the back of the store.

Instead of hating guns, she becomes obsessed with them. Shooting the gun gives her a sense of strength and control that she lost, and she is a natural at handling it. Instead of fighting against guns, she embraces them. She follows the shop owner’s instructions to breathe deeply and squeeze the trigger “on the exhale” as she practices regularly at the local shooting range.

Eventually, she encounters a pro-gun politician and becomes intent on revenge. The choices that she makes in the end releases her obsession and grief.

The raw emotions are so intense during Dee Covington’s vulnerable and yet fanatical performance that you don’t have much time to breathe. But, Covington does as she exhales many times during her story to perhaps calm the “brittleness of spirit” that edges ever closer. The spot-on direction of this monologue by Chip Walton is subtle and yet maintains a continuous tension. (Covington and Walton are the two founders of Curious, and they stepped down last fall.)

The tiny theatre engulfed in black seems to magnify Covington’s every motion on the stark stage design by Markas Henry. Brian Freeland’s ultra-fine sound and projection is miniscule and yet phenomenally powerful. The lighting by Shannon McKinney was where I believe the set truly shined, highlighting the emotional points without being pronounced. As Covington begins her tale, the light strips streaming down are dream-like and misty. When Covington talks of the shooting, a solid spotlight beams down on her pain as if she’s being interrogated. And as the woman begins to unravel, the geometric shapes scattered over the floor gorgeously convey the shattering of her life.

I must admit up front that monologues are my least favorite type of play. However, I was riveted as I watched the exploration of this woman’s journey unfold. In a series of decisions, she overcomes her personal demons. This was the part of the play that I thoroughly enjoyed. But the play stops short of inferring that the woman’s real journey was from obsession to tolerance (and possibly acceptance) of a mindset that she once condemned.