I attended the opening night performance of a dark comedy called The Lonesome West at the theatre where I volunteer. Miguel and Jeremy, a couple actor friends of mine, had the lead roles of brothers Coleman and Valene Conner. They cussed, harassed and fought with each other throughout the play, proving that family hatred can overcome almost any intervention.

During the climax of the play, Coleman runs around the stage with a rifle while Valene fends him off with a large kitchen knife. In a moment of true vindictiveness, Coleman aims his gun at Valene's newly purchased stove and blows the prop away. On this night, it was not the stove that received the bullet wound.

As Coleman and Valene chased each other around the stage during the final scene, I sat in my front row seat, anticipating the stove shot (I had read the script a few months earlier). Coleman whipped around and aimed the rifle at Valene for one more round of cussing when the rifle went off. Coleman was no where near the stove, and instead, the gun went off pointing directly at Valene.

The characters Coleman and Valene melted away in my eyes. I no longer saw two Irish brothers fighting over Taytos and cheap booze. I saw my friend Miguel, three feet in front of me, shoot my friend Jeremy in the gut. The rifle shot was a blank with a confetti burst, but an explosion at such close range still left powder burns on Jeremy's stomach. Jeremy would later tell me that his first thought after the blast was "Brandon Lee." For those who don't know, Brandon Lee, the son of Bruce Lee, was shot and killed by a prop gun loaded with a live round while filming the end of the movie The Crow (good flick, though).

Strange as it may sound, I almost saw this coming. A half year earlier, Jeremy needed a place to live and moved in with Miguel and his girl Tifanie. While the trio got along smoothly, the wear and tear of living together occasionally popped up. Miguel and Jeremy treated each other like brothers long before they were cast in their roles as the Conners.

During the rehearsal month, both would come to me to complain about the other. Miguel muttered about Jeremy coming up lame from their stage fighting. Jeremy would accuse Miguel of taking out his aggression out on him. Two weeks before the show opened, Jeremy found a new place to live. Actors lose themselves in roles, but these two have so much real life experience that putting them in a play where they continually fight with each other is more like therapy than acting.

That's why I had to go opening night. I had to see what the past six months of Miguel and Jeremy living under the same roof would bring to the play. I joked with Miguel a couple times that he would turn on the audience and fire a round into the seats. I wasn't too far off. Miguel shot Jeremy instead.

You could call it an accident, a Freudian slip or destiny. I had a premonition something strange might happen once an audience was present. In one freak moment, all the living together, all of the rehearsing together, all of the hanging out together culminated in Miguel pulling the trigger, shooting Jeremy. In real life, Jeremy would be dead, and Miguel would go to jail for manslaughter. But this was the theatre, and so they did what good actors do. They kept acting and finished the play.

I'm not sure what the lesson is this week. You could make the point that guns are dangerous and should be kept out of the home. You could say that unexpected entertainment like that can only be found at live theatre. You might even realize that the people you care about are also the people you hurt the most.

During the party afterwards, I shared a bottle of Jamison with Miguel and Jeremy. We had a good laugh about the freak incident, thankful that an actual tragedy was avoided. And at the end of the night, there were the two brothers, telling drunken stories to each other and knowing they still had eleven more performances to go.

Chris Jungle wishes he could shoot each of his brothers, just once.