The great playwright Anton Chekhov once said that if a pistol appears in the first act of a play, it had better be fired before the final curtain. The not-so-great playwright Barra Grant takes this dictum to an extreme in A Mother, A Daughter and A Gun, her frantic comedy at Dodger Stages. No sooner has the show begun than Jessica (Veanne Cox) is putting bullets in her brand-new gun -- and, mere seconds later, she's firing shots at the person who's just walked through her front door.

That person is her mother, Beatrice (Olympia Dukakis). She is not Jessica's intended target -- well, not at that moment anyway. Instead, Jessica was expecting David (Matthew Greer), her errant husband, who's a[...]