World premiere of ‘A Good Guy’ confronts the epidemic of gun violence

From left, Suzen Baraka, Wayne T. Carr, Evangeline Edwards / Jeff Lorch

LOS ANGELES – “Whenever someone declares that the best way to stop a school shooter is to arm teachers, I can tell that they haven’t spoken to any teachers about it,” says playwright David Rambo. “Being part of a family of four generations of public-school teachers, I understand the balancing act that teachers perform daily between work and life at home. What happens in one arena inevitably impacts behavior in the other. Now add a gun to the equation, and my play begins.”

In A Good Guy’s brisk, fast-moving 75 minutes, a dedicated high school math teacher who has never wanted to do anything but teach stops a school shooter. It’s what happens in the aftermath—that she never expected or ever wanted—that builds the heightening dramatic interest and excitement.

Director John Perrin Flynn says, “The issue of A Good Guy is gun violence. Did you know gun violence is the leading cause of death in children in the United States? David Rambo has written a remarkable play inhabited by beautifully realized characters, the playing of whom offers complexities of choice and motivation that I have seldom seen. It is an honor to be directing the world premiere.”

Evangeline Edwards, whom we last saw in Heroes of the Fourth Turning, portrays teacher Anna, who is married to a military man subject to seemingly never-ending deployments. I wonder if playwright Rambo folds in this ongoing disruption in Anna’s life as a commentary on the domestic implications of America’s worldwide military footprint. Logan Leonardo Arditty is The Student, an indifferent, troubled teen who surprises his teachers by submitting a deeply researched and well-written paper on the Columbine Massacre that should have been more of a wakeup call to the school authorities. Principal Douglas Blatchley is played by Wayne T. Carr, who also plays all the other adult male roles—a detective, Anna’s husband, and her firearms instructor. As the Principal, it is he who assigns Anna the duty, against her own judgment, of tutoring The Student in math to save him from flunking out. Suzen Baraka is seen at first as the Second Detective participating in Anna’s post-shooting interrogation, a Language Arts teacher, Anna’s old pre-school teacher Ms. Wizner, a school district superintendent, and a lawyer representing a group patently modeled on the National Rifle Association, who offers to represent Anna in what would become a nationally watched lawsuit. Thanks to the audience’s willing suspension of disbelief, these accomplished actors easily convince us of the variety of characters they play through a number of scene shifts by a change of clothing, stance, accent and voice, saving the producers lots of $$ on these smaller roles.

The playwright does a fine job of delineating the fears Anna experiences on many sides, and the good reasons she finds to keep a weapon handy. Rambo constructs a taut drama with dialogue that permits no room for anything extraneous. What it lacks in lyricism it gains in its laser focus on the driving tension as assumptions are questioned and answers do not always conform to expectation. “To some,” Rambo writes in a program note, Anna is “the good guy with a gun, who stopped a bad guy with a gun,” but in fact it’s much more complicated. As we know, in places such as Uvalde and Parkland, the armed and supposed “good guys” were afraid to enter the building!

Jan Munroe created the scenic design, and Christine Cover Ferro the costume design. Christopher Moscatiello is responsible for the sound design), and Dan Weingarten for the lighting design.

A Good Guy runs through October 13 with performances at 8 p.m. Fri. and Mon., 5 p.m. on Sat., and 7 p.m. on Sun. (no performance on Sept. 20). Rogue Machine, at the Matrix Theatre (upstairs on the Henry Murray Stage) is located at 7657 Melrose Ave., Los Angeles 90046. Reservations at the Rogue Machine website, or for more information call (855) 585-5185. Recommended for ages 14+.

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CONTRIBUTOR

Eric A. Gordon

Eric A. Gordon, People’s World Cultural Editor, wrote a biography of radical American composer Marc Blitzstein and co-authored composer Earl Robinson’s autobiography. He has received numerous awards for his People's World writing from the International Labor Communications Association. He has translated all nine books of fiction by Manuel Tiago (pseudonym for Álvaro Cunhal) from Portuguese, available from International Publishers NY.