Click, Boom: Guns in American Theater
What Broadway’s favorite prop reveals about America’s future
This week the headlines were heavy again. A political figure gunned down in public. Another school shooting. Different details, but the same sick rhythm. Shock. Outrage. Grief.
Like many of you, I imagine, the familiarity of all of this got under my skin. At this point it feels like I’ve memorized the plot. I’ve seen this story before. And not just on cable news or Instagram stories or TikTok, but on stage.
When theater tries to tell the story of America, there’s almost always a gun involved. It decides duels, seals romances, escalates feuds, cements legacies. Guns aren’t background props—they’re pivotal.
And that, I think, says something about the country we live in.
So this week, I want to look at “the gun” as a character in American theater—and consider what its lasting presence reveals about who we are.
“Something familiar, something peculiar”
From duels on the frontier to shootouts in the street, the gun has been written into the myths we pass down. Stories of independence. Of conquest. Of rebellion.
Historians call it “regeneration through violence.” The idea that America defined itself not just through bloodshed, but because of it. That the act of violence is what made the nation new again—what gave it meaning, what carved its legacy.
So when American theater sets out to tell the story of our country, it reaches for the same object. Not out of novelty, not for shock, but because the gun has become part of the grammar.
These aren’t theatrical flourishes. They’re structural inevitabilities. We don’t need to explain why it’s there—we understand instinctively. In some strange way, the gun tells the audience: This is America.
And maybe that’s why it feels less like a prop and more like a ritual. A gesture we repeat across eras and aesthetics, not because we want to, but because we’ve been taught that this is how the story goes.
So let’s look at the receipts—the titles we hold up as “about America” and the roles we keep handing the gun.
“The gun, the gun, the gun”
If you trace the canon in order, the gun shows up again and again, reshaped to fit the moment.
In Oklahoma! (1943), the revolver is more than a frontier accessory. It decides who gets the land. And who gets the woman. The musical may be painted in bright prairie colors, but under the dances and the sunshine is a gun deciding what counts as justice.
By West Side Story (1957), the gun has moved into the city. Switchblades flash in balletic choreography, but it’s the pistol that closes the story. One shot, and the fragile possibility of love between Tony and Maria collapses into tragedy.
In Chicago (1975), the gun becomes satire. Roxie Hart pulls the trigger, and instead of shame, she’s rewarded with fame. Violence is turned into vaudeville, a spectacle for the crowd. Here the weapon isn’t just about survival or honor—it’s about celebrity.
By the time we reach Assassins (1990), the gun has become grotesque ritual. A a chorus line of nobodies line up to audition for history, each convinced a bullet will give them permanence. The firearm here is no longer tied to justice or love—it’s a shortcut to legacy.
And then Hamilton (2015), where the duel is mythic. It isn’t just plot—it’s the way history itself is staged. A nation shaped in smoke and powder, with legacies secured by the barrel of a pistol. Hamilton’s death isn’t an ending so much as a coronation. Not to mention, there’s literally a person playing “The Bullet”.
Across seventy years of musicals, the firearm keeps finding work—shifting roles, but never exiting the stage. And the theater isn’t exaggerating, it’s reflecting.
But if our stages can’t tell the story of America without a gun, is it even possible to write the next chapter without one?
“History has its eyes on you”
Theater alone won’t make the shift. It will come from the slow, unglamorous work of policy. Laws are how a country changes its behavior. But stories are how a country changes its mind about what those laws are for.
That’s where the stage is useful. Not to preach, but to clarify. To let us watch what a gun actually does to a world: how it shrinks possibility, hardens lines, turns neighbors into sides. To sit with the reverberation long enough that the consequence can’t be argued away. And to make space for something else to carry meanings we’ve outsourced to the barrel—safety, honor, belonging, power.
Because for a lot of Americans, the gun isn’t an abstraction. It’s a family heirloom, a rite of passage, a stand-in for control in a life that doesn’t offer much. You don’t move that with a statistic alone. You move it by recognition first—by seeing how much meaning we’ve asked the gun to carry. Safety. Power. Freedom. Belonging. And then by asking, honestly, what else might carry that weight. What happens when freedom looks like wages you can live on? Healthcare that doesn’t bankrupt you? A life stable enough to plan beyond tomorrow?
So no, I’m not arguing we banish guns from the stage. Quite the opposite. Keep showing them. Keep showing what they do. But also start redistributing their roles. Let other objects, other ideas, shoulder the meanings we keep handing to the trigger. If legislation rewrites the rulebook, theater can help reshape the grammar.
Maybe that’s how a country as old as ours writes a new chapter—by changing not just the laws of the land, but the props of the story.
One Last Thing
I spent the past week in Paris with my husband and in-laws, and what struck me most—aside from the obscene amount of butter in the croissants—was the history. Every corner, every bridge, every facade seemed to whisper back to the revolution. Centuries of violence, upheaval, and rebirth written in stone and iron and cobblestone.
To stand in a city so steeped in its past while reading news from home—that a political figure had been shot—was disorienting. It made me see the reverberations differently. How one violent act can ripple far beyond its moment. How history isn’t just remembered in books but carried forward in the architecture of a place, and in the psychology of a people.
I don’t know exactly what this moment will mean for America’s future. I don’t want to sanctify it or justify it. But being outside the country gave me perspective I might not have had otherwise: the sense that what feels like a singular event today could be one of those inflection points we live with for generations.
History isn’t just behind us, it’s unfolding under our feet. We’re writing it whether we know it or not.
This week reminded me that none of us are only spectators—we’re all authors, in ways big and small.
See you next week ♥️
—Matt