Sonorous Road’s Production of Framing the Shot Flips the Characters’ Genders and Makes Them Play Against Type

Did you catch the recent Facebook video in which a cat was carefully petting a bird? Framing the Shot is a little like that: a comedy about characters playing against their perceived type. In its original version, which emerging playwright Allan Maule directed in Chapel Hill in 2006, a professional gunman indulged in some male bonding and unlikely sensitive-guy behavior before committing a professional faux pas that made him reexamine his choice of careers. One decade later, when Sonorous Road artistic director Michelle Murray Wells read the script, she wondered what would happen if the gender of the main characters were flipped, and the work became an inquiry into the finer points of etiquette among women with guns instead. Maule signed on for the switch; we’ll see the outcome when Ira David Wood IV directs Wells, comic actor Lorelei Lemon, and Patrick Whalen.