Newtown

WILSON STAGE

WORLD PREMIERE

By Dan O’Brien
Directed by Elizabeth Williamson

The Oregon Shakespeare Festival and the Public Theater co-commissioned Dan O’Brien to write a play about the place of guns in our country’s story, as part of American Revolutions: The United States History Cycle. The resulting play engages with recent history: the prologue and aftermath of the shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, in 2012. Derived closely from documentary source material, the play is at once lyrical and unflinchingly realistic. A heartbreaking and powerful interrogation of the complex causes of gun violence in our culture, Newtown offers in the end the possibility of healing and hope.