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The year 2018 was the deadliest year in American history for school shootings. It was also the year a tiny theater company of teen actors in Dallas set out to create an original stage play about our deep divisions over Second Amendment rights, mass shootings, background checks and automatic weapons.

Often, the national debate over firearms is portrayed as one side versus the other, pro-gun against anti-gun. But the argument isn’t actually binary. There’s complexity. There’s nuance. And there’s drama.

In ‘Gun Play,’ podcast hosts Hady Mawajdeh and Jerome Weeks follow Cry Havoc Theater Company as its student actors travel across the country to talk to folks on all sides of the debate. They meet a mom still wrestling with her daughter’s suicide, a father still grieving his son who was gunned down at school, and the owner of a gun range where the teens shoot AR-15s. The journey takes them from the snows of Sandy Hook, Connecticut, to the steps of the U.S. Capitol and to the floor of the national NRA convention. The young actors, some from neighborhoods plagued by violence, provide a window into an issue that continues to tear at the nation.