Welcome to the first The Bronze Boy newsletter! Thank you for signing up to follow along on this journey from the US to the UK this year. We’re excited to have you with us! This month's entry is from actor/producer Nicole Greevy.
Why
The Bronze Boy? Why now?
Two women. A road trip. America’s bizarre relationship with guns. There’s so much I love in this play, but something Nancy Hamada does so well in this script is craft a story that reminds us that guns are both the cause of so many avoidable tragedies and something that Americans celebrate through our entertainment. Guns are inextricably part of our culture; some of our earliest games as kids, pointing our index fingers at each other and moving our thumbs up and down as a pretend trigger. Actors talk about having to be reminded not to make a “pew pew” sound when filming with a prop gun. They’re used in movies for laughs, for vicarious revenge, above all for entertainment. And in the real world, they kill almost 50,000 Americans every year; the majority of those deaths being suicide by gun.
Heck, guns are an intrinsic part of our theater language, too- “Chekov’s Gun” being the way we say every element in a story must be necessary- in Chekov’s own words: “If you say in the first chapter that there is a rifle hanging on the wall, in the second or third chapter it absolutely must go off.”
The Bronze Boy reminds us of the terrible power of guns- that the holes they tear into living bodies continue to bleed, long after the victim has passed. But it reminds us via a lively, engaging story of two women on a road trip together. It asks us tough questions without beating us over the head with them. And now especially, when it seems mass shootings drift out of the media’s consciousness before the next news cycle, there’s a need for art to remind us that guns are not toys for our entertainment. No matter how badass Sarah Connor looked carrying them in Terminator 2 (and she did look AWESOME).
And there are so many other things to love in this play- two women as the central characters, one of them well past 40, who are not seeking love, or running from it, or nodding gently and dispensing patient wisdom to a guy tripping over his own feet. Nancy created two wonderfully complicated and funny women who are both desperately doing the best they can on the other side of life-altering catastrophe.
