Content Advisories
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 lists below are not exhaustive. Some listed advisories are only briefly mentioned in the plays, whereas others are major themes of the work.
If you have any questions about these content advisories, we encourage you to call or email the box office, and we’re happy to provide more context. (510.841.6500, ext. 303 or boxoffice@shotgunplayers.org).
Quack
Through the story of a popular television doctor, Quack explores how supposedly evidence-based fields like health and medicine are informed by subjective beliefs and self-interest.
Though there is no physical violence depicted onstage, there are descriptions of emotional and physical harm as perpetuated through “men’s rights” activism, diet culture, fatphobia, anti-vaccine movements, and unwanted workplace sexual advances. More specific descriptions include instances of gendered targeted online harassment, addiction to diet pills, and discussion of children dying from measles.
Advisories:
- Realistic depiction of fat-shaming
- Description of children dying of measles
- Offhand pejoratives about people with Tourette's syndrome
- Realistic depiction of misogyny
- Reference to rape
- Realistic depiction of workplace sexual harassment
- Realistic depiction of unwanted sexual advances
- Description of an addiction to diet pills
The Niceties
In The Niceties, a young Black woman finds her work — and self — questioned by her older White female professor. The play shines a light on generational and racial divides and examines the consequences when mainstream feminism often means “White feminism.”
For people of color, the depiction of being talked over, casually dismissed, and other forms of racialized microaggressions may hit close to home. Further, the conversations had in the play may be directly analogous to real-life and personal interactions/relationships.
Further, the show contains lengthy discussion of slavery, the lived experience of enslaved people, and slavery’s modern reprucussions.
Advisories:
- Description of slavery
- Realistic depiction of misogyny
- Reference to historical sexual violence against enslaved Black women
- Realistic depiction of transphobia
Citizen Brain
Citizen Brain includes discussions of Alzheimer's, memory loss, and aging.
The Light
The Light is the story of a young Black couple on the night of their engagement, and the emergence of a past sexual assault that threatens to pull them apart. There are no realistic depictions of sexual violence onstage, but there are repeated descriptions of date rape and sexual assault.
Advisories:
- Description of a sexual assault
