It was quiet enough to hear your own heartbeat as the room darkened to a pitch black inside the small room with its angled roof, inside Matrix Theater on Melrose.
A small spotlight dropped on Anna, and an interrogation began that framed the concept of David Rambo’s meticulously constructed, incredibly intimate play which seeks to brainstorm the question plaguing American for several decades now: What happens when a good guy with a gun is in the room when a bad guy with a gun comes through?
Anna is a teacher of 8th grade math, and when a school shooter bursts into her classroom, gunning for students and staff, she takes matters into her own hands and incapacitates the gunman permanently. Though the ex-wife of a soldier, and complimented as “a natural” shooter on the gun range, it’s her first kill. While the killing could be classified as self defensive, the play calls into question the nobility of her motives and those of the people around her in the aftermath of the incident.
The hypothetical premise gets upended by the turn of the Good Guy in question being a white woman, recently divorced; an excellent worker but emotionally volatile, Anna, defies the profile of a standard hero, fictional or otherwise. And these attributes add more factors to the complexity of her detainment and treatment. If she were a black woman, would the police have been as patient in their questioning? What if she were a black man? And would detainment be skipped altogether if she was a white man?
She‘s placed in a series of situations that challenge her moral compass and simultaneously create an atmosphere of paranoia around her. Suddenly, in the days and weeks that follow the shooting, she’s constantly hounded by paparazzi and press, as well as by NRA lawyers seeking to make her the poster child for gun rights — a view she doesn’t support at all, despite being the textbook “good gun owner.”
Writer David Rambo lays out some fascinating threads, introducing us early on to a troubled young man named Logan Marshall, whom, eventually tutored by Anna, becomes a graduating student off the heels of writing a compelling essay of school shootings that catches the attention of school administration in a strangely positive way. The story is told with a nonlinear structure, used to piece things together as opposed to bringing turbulence to the narrative as happens in most cases; we discover that while Marshall considered antics during his years under Anna’s tutelage as a passing phase, the teacher saw him as her own personal bully in the way he too felt bullied by his classmates.
This is where a twist of Shyamalan-proportions begins: When the school shooting happens, Anna expects that the shooter is Logan Marshall, but a police detective reveals that the shooter is another boy uncharacteristic of the school shooter profile completely — and here we dive into the inner turmoil of Anna, who hoped that she had gotten her revenge on Marshall at last. The story gets dark but never unbelievable: if truth is stranger than fiction, then it’s much more brutal as well, as Rambo takes several real life instances as inspiration for the premise of the story such as the police response during the recent Uvalde shooting, the lockdown procedures during the Parkland shooting and other timely anecdotes.
The casting is the second strength of the play, almost tying first place to the powerful script. Evangeline Edwards carries the heart and soul of A Good Guy with leagues of depth. She keeps a character who is constantly on the brink of mental breakdown from being one note, as she traverses all the stages of grief with a gradient of emotions, expressions and reactions. Wayne T. Carr plays several characters, including Anna’s husband, the school principal and the police investigator, with gravitas across each character, giving them each their own distinct personality. Suzen Baraka also picks up multiple shifts throughout the play, but shines most as a cunning NRA lawyer with ulterior motives who attempts to work her way into Anna’s tragedy with a deceptively generous offer of legal representation.
Logan Arditty portrays the reformed Logan Marshall, a character that is — while presently contrite — had a very checkered and unresolved past. Arditty gave a solid portrayal of a young man who was is both ashamed of and yet oblivious to the consequences of his actions. It’s another complimentary bit to Rambo’s writing in that he’s painted a perfect picture of a young, disenfranchised white male who doesn’t quite live in reality as we know it, but is both bitter from societal neglect as well being self absorbed by his own entitlement.
Rambo plays an interesting card here. While Marshall isn’t responsible for how others treated him, he was responsible for his own torment of Anna some years before. If we were to use adages: “hurt people hurt people,” but we could counter with “you can’t control what people do, but you can control how you react.” This play does a lot of that: as David Rambo says on the Playbill, he’s not here to offer any solutions, but he does play devil’s advocate, plaintiff, bailiff and sheriff; we get to see the topic of gun violence from all angles without any commentary on who’s the winning side.
The stage of my viewing, The Matrix Theater, designed by Jan Monroe (scenic design), Dan Weingarten (Lighting Design) and Christopher Moscatiello (sound design), was a uniquely intimate space. A smaller venue than you’d picture for the topic at first glance, the design team elevated it to be an incredibly cerebral experience. The lighting cues achieved both scale and claustrophobia when needed; the sound effects were bold and crisp when triggered and created a cinematic atmosphere; the overall stage design worked for each scene regardless of whether it was Anna’s retail job or her and her ex-husbands home. Things were placed well and spaced for a satisfying amount of action.
Haunting, relevant and visceral, with a 75-minute runtime (that could easily have been extended to 90), David Rambo’s A Good Guy presents us with plenty of questions — about gun control, bullying, violence in schools — and no clear answers. But that’s a good thing. In the wake of events like Uvalde, and being the only country with an unbeatable record of school massacres, Rambo challenges viewers on both sides of the argument to look at everyone as a human: flawed heroes and sympathetic villains.
On any given day any one of us could be an Anna or a Logan; and amidst the chaos, confusion and debate, maybe the question both sides haven’t asked yet is how many lives is your argument worth?
