The MFJS Reporter — Winter 2020 M-W

The Secretary, written by Kyle John Schmidt, is a two hour play surrounding the topic of gun control being performed at Curious Theatre in Denver. According to a synopsis on the New Play Exchange, The Secretary is a play about the owner of a gun company, Ruby. The show opens with a school secretary taking down a school shooter. The show explores the reactions and implications of Ruby naming a gun after The Secretary in reaction.

For me, the show was hard to look away from. It was filled with emotion and connection for all two hours, and I loved it. 

“When I was watching tonight I was thinking, there’s always two points of view at all times in the scene, which I appreciated and also feel a bit confounded by,” said audience member and education director at Curious, Dee Covington. 

Covington has been working in and around schools for many years, and has been asked to remain in a classroom due to a gun threat more than once. Leaning into the front edge of her seat, she says that this piece of theatre impacted her view on guns, giving her a better understanding of why someone would want a gun for protection. 

Emma Messenger, an actress in the production playing the role of Lorrie Burnham, agrees with Covington and says that she thinks the playwright successfully portrays the reality of the gun argument in America. 

“He sees it not as a black and white at all, it’s all very very gray. There’s a lot more to think about here than just liking guns or not,” said Messenger. 

The show is full of different perspectives, characters who use guns to protect themselves, women who want nothing to do with guns, and victims of gun violence, all coming together to interact in a gun company and share their perspectives. I found each and every character in the show to bring me a new attachment— I couldn’t pick a favorite.

Curious Theatre has a reputation for putting forward very provocative work. One of the core values listed on their website is that their work is unapologetically progressive. Thus, many of the actors and audience members said that they came in expecting a show that would take a side in the gun debate, and they came out of the performance feeling as though both sides of the argument had been portrayed successfully. 

The theatre has been around since 1997, and has quite the reputation around Denver for it’s thought challenging work. It is a pillar in the theatre community, having actors and actresses from places all over Colorado come to work. It caters towards an older crowd, although the theatre is trying to pull in a younger audience with a teen night and student discount.

“If we put the amount of resources that we need to put into mental health, then everything in this show could have been avoided, I feel like our country needs to shift it’s priorities quite a bit in that capacity,” said Karen Slack, an actress portraying the character Brandy in the production. 

Slack is very opinionated on the subject of guns, but she said that this production changed her mind and helped open her up to new perspectives. She said that she had never in her life been in a position of fear such that she needed a gun, but that through the script and meeting people after the show, she had come to see that perspective clearer. 

“The only way we will ever have a healthy conversation about guns is if everyone puts away their anger, and starts to think about why we need guns, and why we don’t need guns, and find a middle ground within that,” said Slack as the theatre emptied out, back into the cold, off to think about guns.