Peppermint Creek’s ‘On the Exhale’ is a painful but important experience

It’s 2 o’clock Sunday morning. After one too many glasses of wine, my husband and I are ruminating on how someone could develop an obsession with guns. The conversation quickly turns into one of our familiar dystopian dread spirals: cybersecurity, the Signal chat and what happens if a terrorist group can shut everything down, like our phones, access to our money, the electric grid and GPS systems, à la 2023’s “Leave the World Behind.”

We talk about going off the grid, living off our nonexistent vegetable garden, the potassium iodide tablets we should buy and the family members we would care for. We speculate that there would be people competing for resources. We would need to protect ourselves and the kids. What kind of firearm would we need? Where would we store it so that the kids wouldn’t have access to it, but we could get it quickly if we needed it? How did the conversation turn to firearm ownership so fast?

Peppermint Creek Theatre Co.’s production of “On the Exhale,” by Martin Zimmerman, explores a single parent’s obsessional anxiety about being the victim of gun violence at the hands of one of her disgruntled college students and what this would mean for her young son, who would have no one to care for him. This dread transforms into the searing pain of loss when a gunman obliterates her son’s elementary school classroom. Her debilitating suffering morphs into an obsessional interest in holding, owning, shooting and hiding a semi-automatic weapon. She’s maniacally amused by how easy it is to procure one of these things. She returns to work too soon and normalizes this emotional dissociation by escaping to the shooting range during her workday. The shoulder bruising brought about by the weapon’s recoil allows her a visceral expression of her grief. 

In what’s essentially a 70-minute monologue, actress Heather Lewis and lighting designer Zara Hertafeld carry the show. Lewis’ pacing, physicality, modulation and vocal clarity are utterly impressive. The lights love her: The minimalistic set and the mirrors allow the lights to bathe her in a warm, intimate glow. The audience is her therapist, her confidant, her friend. You’re inside her head. Drawn into the horror of it all, you normalize her decision to experience her son’s last moments.  

However, Peppermint Creek does this actress a bit of a disservice. At the start of the performance is a plug for the Mikey23 Foundation by the mother of Michael McKissic II, a young man who died at the hands of a gunman.
McKissick’s mother’s voice cracks with raw emotion as she mentions her son, taken from the world far too soon. How could any actress possibly follow this demonstration of authentic grief, and as an audience, how could we not compare these two women? It’s beneficial to remind us that tragedy happens to real people who live among us, but it’s my hope that the director will decide to move the PSA to the end of the show and give Lewis the space she needs to be the emotionally nimble actress she is.