Theater preview: Dan Froot & Company's Arms Around America 

• Bailey Holiver
• Dan Froot (center rear) and the cast of Arms Around America

Dan Froot understands how potential viewers of Arms Around America might think about a theater production that takes a position of curiosity and openness to the issue of guns in America—because it's the way he himself used to think about it.

"I entered this pretty solidly on the side of the gun reform camp—even more leftist radical than that, basically wanting to take people's guns away," says Froot, the producer and founder of Dan Froot & Company, which is staging Arms Around America. "I have come to recognize that it is so complicated, and that, just like money is not just about money, and sex is not just about sex, guns are not just about guns."

Presented as a live radio show-style production—complete with Froot himself serving as Foley artist for sound effects—Arms Around America consists of staged readings developed from six oral histories, a process begun in 2018 in the aftermath of the mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla. Froot's company had already developed a work called Pang in a similar format, basing short plays on oral histories of people around the country living with food insecurity, and Froot saw the format as one with unique emotional potential. "The live radio play format puts the listener in the position of having to imagine the scenario, an empathic position where there's a gap between what they're seeing—a bunch of people reading scripts—and what they're hearing, the live sound effects and the music," he says. "That to me, that work the audience has to do, the imaginative work, is where empathy really comes in."

Still, it's not easy to distill millions of possible stories—some from people whose lives have been impacted by gun violence, some from those for whom guns have been a large part of their lives—into six. For assistance in that curatorial process, Froot worked with partner arts organizations in Los Angeles, Miami, and Helena, Montana. Those organizations reached out to prospective subjects, and from there began a process that, importantly for Froot, centers a "consent-based process" that allowed the subjects to review how their stories would be dramatized.

"We do take artistic license in telling our stories," Froot says. "Some of these plays are [only] nine minutes, so there's a certain violence done to a person's story when you're pulling a single thread out of the fabric of someone's life. It was important that we were abiding by the spirit of the person's story, if not the actual sequence of events. These were not our stories; they belong to someone else. We're accountable."

It was also important to Froot that each live production facilitate the process of talking about the issues. To that end, each performance will include a post-show "kitchen table" discussion involving people from the community representing a range of perspectives. "They get the last word," Froot notes, "so we can model a civil dialogue, and so the whole theater becomes the kitchen table."

That is, of course, an easier-said-than-done notion in a time of intense ideological division, and where the subject of guns is one of many fronts in the national culture war. Froot says the overall response to Arms Around America has been positive thus far, but certainly not universally so. "We have gotten some really strong feedback from people that we should take a stand against guns, because that's how they feel," he says. "I guess we build coalitions based on people who are ready to build those coalitions with us. They may know that they're ready, or they may not know that they're ready, or there may be people who are just not ready, and that's okay. ... We start with the people who are ready to have the door opened."

And Froot had to have that door opened for himself as well, as someone starting from that "leftist radical" place. But as a dramatist, he understood that he wouldn't have a chance to fall in love with these characters—a precondition for telling their stories compassionately—if he didn't begin the process from a place of openness, however difficult that might be.

"I entered into this because, in part because, I could see that the gun 'debate' is not getting us anywhere; it's just one side trying to get over on the other side, winning the argument," Froot says. "And it's clear that in terms of gun violence, we're not going to make headway unless we try to find some common ground and listen to one another.

"I can now really feel genuine interest and affection for people I really strongly disagree with around the issue of guns," he adds. "For me, it has become clear that guns are really full of meaning for people, and that you can't take that meaning away. You need to understand that meaning, and relate to that meaning, until we can talk about what kind of changes can be made. So I'm much less strident than I was."