The Magnolia Ballet

Shotgun Players is equally committed to presenting challenging work and taking care of our patrons.

Content advisories are a tool to help our patrons choose how they want to engage with each play. While we have tried to cover the most common sensitivities, the list below is not exhaustive. Some listed advisories refer to lines only briefly mentioned in the plays, whereas others are major themes of the work. These advisories will be updated regularly as plays are developed in rehearsal and production.

The Magnolia Ballet confronts the enduring legacies of white supremacy, racial violence, and colonial trauma in America.

It includes references to slavery, the Middle Passage, lynchings (historic and modern), the Trail of Tears, and the assassinations of Black leaders. The show contains stylized depictions of violence, including the decapitation of a child, sexual acts, and gunshot-like sounds from an onstage video game. Language includes the use of the n-word and f-slur, and scenes engage themes of homophobia, corporal punishment, and Confederate iconography.

These elements are woven into a larger exploration of Black survival, queerness, and ancestral memory. Bodies attacked by these violences are miracles and we bare witness as rebellion against their attempted erasure. Please hold care for yourself as/if/when you engage these histories.

In The Magnolia Ballet, Confederate iconography is not used for shock or spectacle, but as a spectral residue—evidence of a past that refuses to remain past. These symbols surface not as static history, but as active agents in a nation’s cyclical ritual of forgetting and re-violating. By invoking them, we confront the brutal truth that the dismemberment of Black bodies has always been tied to the dismembering of memory itself: to erase what was, to control what will be. Onstage, these artifacts are not revered—they are distressed, distorted, and ultimately regurgitated by the swamp that creeps from stage left to stage right, a slow-moving reclamation. From this decay, buds of possibility emerge, fragile but insistent, rooting a future that remembers differently—one where survival is not silence, but bloom.