American Gunshow Revisited: Interview with Makoto Hirano

A version of this article originally appeared in Pacific Citizen.

In August 2025, Team Sunshine Performance Corporation performed the latest iteration of The Great American Gunshow, an interview-informed devised theater performance exploring American gun culture, gun violence and trauma, and the tension within US society over the “right of the people to keep and bear Arms.” The performance was held over three nights at Safe-Hub, a non-profit organization that provides a physically and emotionally safe space for young people in the Kensington/Harrowgate neighborhood of North Philadelphia. 

Helmed by lead artist Makoto Hirano, Gunshow documents, maps, archives and reflects our society’s collective experience through a theatrical presentation designed as a unique hybrid of a live performance event and a participatory forum. The son of Shin-Issei immigrants raised in Chicago, Hirano is no stranger to guns, having served in the US Marine Corps prior to getting his BFA in dance at Temple University.

Created through 75+ hours of interviews with Philadelphians experiencing different aspects of gun culture, Gunshow explores the humanity at the heart of the issues surrounding guns and invites audiences to engage in a more nuanced discussion. Together, performers and audience work to understand these issues as a way to imagine a better future for Philadelphia. 

Hirano participated in an interview with Pacific Citizen during the summer of 2021, when the project began in earnest. In that year, US gun deaths were reported at an all-time record high of 14.6 deaths per 100,000 people. This alarming statistic was accounted for through a significant increase in gun homicides during the pandemic, and also the highest recorded number of gun suicides in a single year since the Center for Disease Control began recording such data in 1968. Gun suicides have continued to rise, reaching their current peak in 2023 with a recorded 27,300 deaths. Overall there has been a decrease in gun violence in the past two years, but guns remain the leading cause of death for children and teens.

In an interview conducted after the Philadelphia production concluded, Hirano offers his thoughts on the current landscape of gun violence, and lessons learned from the intensive co-creation process.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Since our first interview in 2021 how has the project progressed, and what was the timeline for the recent Philadelphia production in August 2025?

In 2021 our pilot phase began in Bloomsburg, rural PA. We spent over a year dipping in and out, over 9 or 10 trips total for me. Some of those were interviews, some were meetings. We started that project without a map at all. We did a thing called snowball sampling – we met people through other participants until we had enough interviews. August of ‘22 is when we did our Bloomsburg performance. We also did a performance of that same version in Philly. The rest of ’22, all of ‘23 and most of ’24 – almost two years was spent designing the process for our most recent production.

There are obvious differences between rural Bloomsburg and Philadelphia, but what specifically led to this lengthy retooling of the devised theater process?

Ultimately, it was our conversations with Michael O'Bryan. He's a local who really knows Philly and a super smart dude. We brought him on as a local advisor/mentor. In one of our first meetings he said, “you can't do what you did in Bloomsburg here in Philadelphia.” I'll never forget this, Mike said, “if you go about it the way you did with Bloomsburg, without a map, you might accidentally leave out the people who are most affected by gun violence in Philadelphia.” And that had never occurred to me. We were eight months out from starting interviews, and we paused everything. We had to rethink the whole project, the whole process, everything about it. That process took like an extra year.

It sounds like Michael had a profound impact on the direction of this production. Were there other people in Philadelphia who helped develop a more intentional model for engaging the populations who are most impacted by gun violence?

There's another person named Kevin Carter, who we met through Mike. Kevin is a counselor and a licensed clinical social worker. He’s run a lot of grief counseling groups throughout the city and other places. Kevin said, “you want to interview people who are at the highest risk of gun violence, the people that this is a regular thing for?” And we were like, “yes, not just them, but yes, absolutely.” And he said, “for those people, what are you going to offer them that's going to address their urgent, immediate safety concerns? If you're not going to somehow address that, why would they want to meet you?”

I had no answer for that… Because then they're just re-traumatized, right? Then we had to ask: is the project in service to them, their story, and anything that supports them? I didn't have an answer for that. Michael O'Bryan first challenged us about the process, and then Kevin Carter asking us that question was the second whammy. We realized we were nowhere close to putting out a call for interviews.

How did you move forward from that point in the project?

Alex Torra was my partner in crime, who serves with me as co-director of Team Sunshine. Sarah Branch served as a community liaison for about two years of this process, which eventually became kind of a co-creator, co-thinker role. The three of us were making decisions together, regularly brainstorming and having ideas, meeting with Mike.

We decided to focus based on something that came straight out of Mike O’Bryan. He said, “who are the most at risk of being shot at or killed?” I didn't know. Mike said, “Black men.” Then we found this interactive website where you could look up Philly gun violence data. In a given year you could look at specific time spans, where the shootings happened, and in what zip codes.

Through that, I figured out the highest level of gun violence was in four zip codes in North Philly. They're right next to each other. Kensington, Nicetown-Tioga, Hunting Park, and Frankford. We knew we had to do the project there. We had to focus a lot of our interviews with people from those neighborhoods, and do the performance there.

Another thing we learned from that website was that between 2014-2024, if you were Black, male, between the ages of 18 and 25, and outside between 8pm and 3am in any of those four zip codes, it's very likely you would get shot, because that's who's being shot the most. Immediately it was about race. And I thought, we have to focus on young black men. So in that sense, race played a huge role. 

Speaking of race – in our 2021 interview, you shared this driving question of “how safe do I feel as a Japanese American?” That was during a moment when more people were buying guns during the pandemic. How did you navigate the conversation of race in this version of the project? 

Since we started Gunshow, race was always a topic. It never isn't. But the way we talk about race in Philadelphia and in Bloomsburg as it relates to guns is so different. We focused on it a lot in the Bloomsburg version because I was a person of color going into their predominantly white community, asking a bunch of questions and making a show about it. So race was an inescapable part of the project.

In a different way it's inescapable in Philly because of crime and redlining, and because of economic inequalities that are all race based. In the early days, I was thinking of this project as the intersection of being Asian and gun violence. That was my early hunch of what this project was going to be about. During the pilot phase, we released our notions about Asian-ness as the intersection, because as it turns out, guns are the intersection of almost everything. The points of intersection are slightly different in each community, but it's multifaceted wherever we go.

How did you source your interviewees, and can you tell us a little about the interview process?

We started with an intake form. We said no to about 50% of the people who applied. The majority of those were white people who didn't live/work in those zip codes, don't own guns, had never been shot at, never shot a gun – and yet had a lot of opinions about guns and gun violence. They were way outside the scope of this production. We ended up interviewing 50 people in total, with a heavy emphasis on the local residents of the four zip codes where gun violence is most prevalent. 

I did every single interview except one, that Alex did. Alex was at like a third or less of the interviews. The community liaison, and sometimes the creative producer would be in touch with interviewees, but the actual relational exchange was on me. And from there, I became the resource for the project.

The interviews were free-flowing. I told participants we could start anywhere. At times I would try to steer us toward a particular topic related to what the person shared, but for the most part we just let it flow. I love connecting with people like that, and it feels like one of the ways that I'm in my zone.

It sounds like you might have experienced some secondary trauma delving into these subjects with victims of gun violence. How did you and the creative team navigate self-care? 

Since I was the main person interfacing with interviewees, in some ways that made it really simple. I became the funnel – the one-human filter for the rest of the team. I'm changed now because of those people. If we had stopped the project for some reason and didn't make a show, I was already changed. I definitely never experienced that before.

Jackie Soro, the other performer, they started deep diving into the project starting at the beginning of July. Some days they were like, “whoa y'all, this is a lot. I took the binder home with me and read a bunch of stuff. I listened to such and such interview. That was a heavy one.” Jackie went through ups and downs, but it wasn't in direct relationship with someone else. Just them with the information. And it felt like a journey that they had to go through on their own to figure out where they would land with this piece.

What was it like turning all of this input into a show?

We went through the hardest, most challenging, artistic process that I've ever had the pleasure of being part of. Which is, how do we take all this information and make something that is digestible? What I mean is something informative, entertaining, and that doesn’t end with a bummer. Something that also honors the stories and the perspectives that people shared with us. 

It was so hard and it was so exhilarating to do it, because every single day for the eight-week rehearsal process, it felt like we were moving something forward. Trying new stuff and figuring out what from the previous version we could keep. Ultimately what we want to do is create a skeleton of a project, a performance where some parts are replicable, some parts are not. Some elements of Gunshow Philly came from Gunshow Bloomsburg.

To your earlier point on creating a digestible show, how did you balance the heavy subject matter with the overall audience experience?

It's so easy for this project to be a bummer. We wanted to avoid that. But also, how do we not do fake hope? One of many inspirations for the narrative arc was John Oliver. His show is filled with tragic terrible news, compounding throughout each episode. Usually at the end, there's some kind of uplifting counterpoint. And we were like, “how do we find our version of that in Philly?” 

It took a while to figure that out, but we realized the solution was to highlight the people and organizations who are doing the incredible work already. These people are not in the news and so often not being recognized by the city, but they are the ones who are addressing the needs of people on the ground level. 

What are some of the solutions the interview participants shared with you?

We learned so many things from so many people, but everyone shared the same thing: you can't solve guns, because guns in Philly isn't one issue. Even if we magically made guns disappear, we still have the underlying issues that are causing the violence. It's because people are suffering. People are in need on many levels, and their needs are not being met.  

In our first interview I asked whether you were pro or anti-gun. You shared that you were neither. Has that changed since you completed this most recent production? 

As long as I'm doing Gunshow, I don't think I should become a gun owner. There's something about the narrative of the show, and that I'm not a gun owner. I don’t have one, but I guess I could get one.  

It feels like a line in the sand. And having done as much research as you have, you buying a gun would be an informed decision.

Oh, it definitely does feel like a turning point. Not a point of no return, because obviously you don't have to be a gun owner forever. But it feels like I would be making a pretty big decision. After all this, wouldn’t it be really weird if one day I woke up and I'm like, “do I want to go buy a gun today?” I could pass my background check so in theory I can go get one whenever I want and then I'd be a gun owner. And still, I'm currently choosing not to. Nothing is drawing me to it.

Having done this version of the show are there any lessons learned, or things that you'll take into the next iteration of the project?

One of the many huge things that we learned in this project is that there are five or eight different versions of Philadelphia that people are living in, as it relates to guns. Gun violence for some people, it's their daily life whether they choose it or not. And some people, it's out of sight, out of mind. There's no attempt to understand by many who do not experience gun violence directly. I feel really sad about it, and that makes me want to do this project more and in other places.

Doing this production, I've learned a lot that will inform how we go forward. Gunshow is really a project about how we are in relationship with each other. How we are navigating the identity of “we” together. Maybe “we” can do it better? And then using guns as the excuse to gather. Simply put, it feels like a vehicle to have really fascinating yet effecting conversations.

For this version we met so many people who are doing great work to address the underlying causes of gun violence. On a personal level I started to feel like maybe I should work for one of these organizations. But those people told us, “thank you for doing this in this way, bringing your audience together to hear our stories.” It's funny to hear that because I'm feeling like I'm in the wrong field. But then consistently, they're like, “no, you keep doing this. We'll keep doing what we do.” In the moments where I'm hearing about their programming and what they accomplished, it makes me question, what am I really doing? But they see the value, and want it to continue.

To read more about The Great American Gunshow and support future productions, visit www.teamsunshineperformance.com/gunshow