Run Out of Town
In Run Out of Town 84-year-old Toni Hart tells the story of her post W.W. II childhood in rural Minnesota, across the river from the prairie mythologized by Laura Ingalls Wilder. It is performed as part of United Solo’s Fall 2026 season at Theatre Row,
Their two childhoods share a landscape but little else. Hart’s “rotten father” was an antisemite with an explosive temper and a fixation on firearms. She survived him only because her mother somehow protected her.
Hart tells her story with warmth and vulnerability. She smiles often, makes self-deprecating Midwestern jokes such as “Suck it up, buttercup.” She seems genuinely grateful for her audience and glad to have lived long enough to stand in front of one; she is still recovering from throat cancer surgery
There are no lighting cues, no sound design, and no set. Her one prop is her 2017 book Gun Culture USA: Where It Comes From and Why It Won’t Go Away. At one point, she admits she has written some cues on her arm in ink. This absence of artifice is charming and the evening at times feels less like theater than a story told in someone’s living room.
That informality has a cost, her story tends to meander, circling back and drifting onto side roads before it finds its way home. A tighter structure would have sharpened the experience without sacrificing its intimacy.
However, when Hart does stay on course her history is compelling, and her assessment of American culture is insightful. She traces the American attachment to guns back to the frontier, where a family in a sod house would not have lasted a season unarmed. It was the grandchildren of those same homesteaders who recognized the unacceptable and uncontrollable violence in her father, they formed a posse and literally drove her family out of town before he killed someone.
Hart does not tell this as a humiliation, but rather it becomes an opportunity for her father’s redemption and in the end perhaps a hopeful sign for our country. Sometimes the wisdom of the crowd is profound.
She leaves the most personal threads dangling. Her escape from her father and any final peace between them are not answered in the show. Perhaps these are saved for a future project, or another platform. She taped this performance to slice into TikToks, hoping her 10,000 followers (accustomed to her vet tech animal videos) might now engage with her arguments on guns. She is transparent about wanting to go viral. (I’m rooting for you (@ToniHartNY)).
Having outlived both the man who sought to destroy her and an illness that almost silenced her, she is a survivor in every sense of the word. The lingering question she poses is can we like the vigilante mob that forced her family to flee, rid ourselves of the frontier myth and our perilous obsession with firearms before they must be pried “from our cold dead hands?” In a country where firearms now exceed the population, Toni Hart is determined to continue raising this question one TikTok at a time.
Run Out of Town
Starring: Toni Hart
Performed on October 27, 2026
October 19 – November 22, 2026
Theatre Row, 410 West 42nd Street, in Manhattan
Reviewer: Emily Lansbury
Comments