NEW YORK — As America deals with an epidemic of gun violence — a Sunday shooting at a Mormon church in Michigan being only the latest example — a British play arrives on Broadway with the Manhattan Theatre Club about a single blow to the jaw with a clenched fist.

That might sound like a play making a tacit argument for tighter gun laws. That certainly comes to mind in the current U.S. context: fists don’t rip through lungs or cause blood to spurt from the neck. But in “Punch,” the potent James Graham drama about the fallout from an everyday fight on the sidewalk outside a Nottingham pub, that blow nonetheless proves fatal. And, as in all instances of violent crime, the fallout then ricochets across multiple families.

Graham’s play, which originated at the Nottingham Playhouse, is based o

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