FERNDALE, Mich.–In Martin Zimmerman’s On The Exhale, now performing at The Slipstream Initiative Theatre here, one of the most original things the playwright captures is the mash-up of astonishment and revulsion that a gun-control subscriber feels when they buy their first gun. Even an assault rifle. It is laughably easy to buy one. As easy as opening a membership at Planet Fitness. But, of course, there is nothing funny about that at all.

The play is a one-woman show, structured like a TED-talk…sort of. There is nothing much else to liken it to unless it is a storytelling night. Delivered superbly by Tiaja Sabrie as a grieving mother, the monologue is no doubt inspired by the horrific shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut in 2012.

The play debuted in New York Off-Broadway at Black Box Theatre at the Harold and Miriam Steinberg Center for Theatre.

The Ted-talk style approach is an interesting one adopted by Zimmerman. What unfolds from Sabrie, directed by Bailey Boudreau on the spare set, is this mother’s and university’s professor’s journey–from pregnancy and raising her young son through kindergarten and the early grades, describing his personality and her own development as a mother, through the day she went to the school in the aftermath of the shooting, and then finally through her avenues of grief and her attempts to do the right thing by taking part on a legislative hearing about school shootings.

Her grief takes her on cathartic shopping trip for a copy of the very gun that the shooter used to end her child. Not having been at the school when he was cut down, and not able to confront the shooter or his family, she needs to get close to the event, to see what the weapon feels like. And she wants to meet the seller, if she can, who sold the killer his guns, and to other killers just like him.

Her dull experience taking her turn at a state legislature hearing is salt in her wound. She throws herself into the gears of government where the gears just keep turning without ever achieving a task.

The back end of the one-hour monologue achieves a build toward something the author teases at. And so as to not create a spoiler, let us just say that sometimes there is no winning or losing in life. Those who try to define it as a series of wins and losses are the same people who think they can just win at any game using a gun. Those people suck by the way.

Sabrie is convincing as the Mother. She is as deliberative as her character might be delivering a talk on Beowulf in a university lecture hall. But she wears the pierce to her heart in her eyes and an occasional quaver in her voice that causes her trip a line or two. She’s pissed, yes. But she is also seeking to understand the set of things that have taken place to make it so easy for a psychopathic miscreant to casually buy the means to end a bunch of children who were only just starting to figure life out.

Guns throw hot lead at high velocity, too often with the intent of tearing through the heart muscle or the brain of a human being. On The Exhale is a compelling reminder that lives do not just begin and end. They overlap, and continue to touch and breathe life into those who are left behind.

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