Rady & Bloom Collective Playmaking Announces Six Free Workshop Showings of THE GUN SHOW

Rady&Bloom Collective Playmaking is excited to announce the world premiere workshop of The Gun Show, a new devised theater experience exploring our varied understandings and perceptions relating to guns and their use. Created by Rady&Bloom Artistic Director Jeremy Bloom, The Gun Show will run on Saturdays and Sundays at 3pm from September 10th-25th at Pershing Hall on Governors Island in New York City.

Gun violence in the U.S. has a complex history and a devastating legacy that plays out daily. Policy change seems impossible, hopelessly stymied in a battle between those for and against. But the presence of weapons in our daily lives is multifaceted. How can we peel back the layers? The Gun Show will incorporate pieces of conversations, stray thoughts, sound and dance into a fast paced exploration of a multitude of voices dialoging on guns. The Gun Show weaves together a variety of written experiences and imaginings into a spoken choral piece for three performers. Note: no actual or prop guns will be used in the play and no threatening acts of violence will be recreated.

Text for the Gun Show was culled from hundreds of individuals and assembled by Jeremy Bloom. Contributors responded to brief questionnaires or participated in non-thinking writing workshops. They were asked to write quickly, privately and impulsively, resulting in a text that feels intensely personal. The focus is on individual experience, rather than policy or statistics. The Gun Show is directed by Bloom and features Heather Thiry, Lachrisha Brown, and Dana Kaplan-Angle with scenic design by Brian Rady, and assistant directed by Mitchel Civello. This workshop is being co-produced by Rady&Bloom and Maia Safani, made possible by HERE.

Ferries to Governors Island will depart on the hour and half hour from the Battery Maritime Building in Manhattan as well as Pier 6 in Brooklyn. Shows will run on Saturday and Sunday September 10th, 11th, 17th, 18th, 24th, and 25th at 3pm in Governors Island's Pershing Hall. To avoid late seating, take the 2 or 2:30pm ferry or earlier for all performances.

All tickets are free, but reservations are encouraged.

SEATING IS LIMITED. RSVP to radyandbloom@gmail.com

FERRY INFORMATION https://govisland.com/info/ferry

About Rady&Bloom Collective Playmaking

Husband/husband team "Rady & Bloom have become rising stars in the indie theatre world" (TDF Stages). Since its inception in 2009, their NYC-based company Rady&Bloom Collective Playmaking has produced 12+ original full productions among a diverse and ever-growing ensemble, using original music, words, and movement devised directly for the performers, building roles and characters to the eccentricities of specific group dynamics. Distilled from personal experience, R&B aims to cultivate a mood, an assertive and complex yet welcoming cultural texture: party meets epic meets chorale meets ethnography.

Rady&Bloom is interested in staging narratives in a stripped down, efficient manner, with high energy and a sense of visual lyricism. We are drawn to modern mythology-stories that ask us to believe in something bigger than ourselves. We aim to create work that draws from a diversity of mediums and disciplines that embrace traditions in chamber and literary theater, adapting important non-theatrical sources from our present and past, nurturing a new community of daring and intelligent young theater artists and fostering an awareness and compassion for the interconnectedness of all things.

Over the next 2-3 years R&B is in residence at HERE via the HERE Artist Residency Program to develop O, a new work with music and puppetry examining the world's oceans.

Last year, R&B premiered THE UPPER ROOM, a darkly humorous modern fairy tale inspired by the back-to-the-land movement, within the context of sea-level rise. The sold-out, month-long run was a New York Times Critic's Pick.

For more information about the company please visit www.radyandbloom.com