Reviews 2013
Reviews 2013
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by Sam Shepard & Patti Smith, directed by Esther Jun
Heart in Hand Theatre, Cameron House, Toronto
January 30-February 14, 2013
Slim: “Now what’ll we do?”
In 1970 future music legend Patti Smith and future theatre legend Sam Shepard had an affair. Shepard was only 26 but had written twenty plays and had been married for a year and had a six-month-old son. Smith was a year away from making her public debut as a poet. When their affair ended the two did what any artists in the New York alternative arts scene would do – they write a play about their affair and even starred as their alter egos in the premiere on April 29, 1971.
Now Heart in Hand Theatre has revived Cowboy Mouth, the hour-long play that Smith and Shepard wrote over a two-day period. The piece is more of a curiosity than a good play. Each of the two characters has a monologue that explains their philosophy to such an extent that the action surrounding these two monologues is almost unnecessary. When the Shepard character Slim says to the Smith character Cavale, “Now what’ll we do?” on two occasions, about halfway through, it sounds as if Shepard as author is asking Smith as author what else they can invent to pad out the action after they’ve already said what they wanted.
The premise for the action is that Cavale (Jessica Huras) has kidnapped the down-on-his-luck singer Slim (Jason Collett) off the streets in order to make him a star – or, more specifically and grandiosely, “a rock-’n’-roll Jesus with a cowboy mouth”. The two, however, fall in love, never leaving Cavale’s dump site of an apartment. Slim vacillates between accusing Cavale of ruining his life by making him leave his wife and child and asking Cavale to comfort him with her stories of dead poets. The problem with her stories about Johnny Ace, Gerard de Nerval and François Villon is that the first accidentally blew his brains out, the second committed suicide and the third was condemned to death – all at a young age. Cavale’s death-obsession is made manifest in her pet Raymond, a dead crow, that she plays with and talks to.
While we learn nothing of Slim’s past, we discover that Cavale was born on the day Johnny Ace shot himself, used to wear metal plates to correct her club foot and remembers being in a mental institution where she had electric shock therapy. Instead, of resolving their differences, the two rely on calling in a delivery boy (or is he a hallucination?) called Lobster-Man (Mikey Lipka) for a change of scenery and an object they can mutually taunt.
Slight as the play is, it would work much better with stronger direction than Esther Jun is able to provide. She allows Cavale (whose name means “escape”) to be so passive and wrapped up in her own dream world, it’s impossible to see how she could have got herself together enough to leave her apartment, much less kidnap anybody. As for Slim, Jun has him display his anger in such infantile tantrums it’s impossible to see how Cavale ever thought he could be a star, much less a saviour. Thus, unfortunately, the dynamics of the relationship between these two volatile characters is not at all clear. Jun makes both of them passive so that there’s no sense of struggle for dominance.
Jun has also not decided whether the play in primarily naturalistic with incursions of the surreal, wholly naturalistic or wholly surreal. In the production the inarticulate Lobster-Man seems merely a young guy who has to wear a lobster costume as part of his job of delivering food from a seafood restaurant. The play’s finale where the Lobster-Man doffs his red shell-like casing to become a man could be magical, but Jun would have had to have created some kind of surreal aura about him for the scene’s symbolism to be fully effective. Worse, it is in no way clear that Lipka as the man inside is supposed to represent the “rock and roll savior” the text says he is.
Jason Collett, best known as a singer-songwriter and member of the indie group Broken Social Scene, is making his acting debut with this play. He certainly has potential and is most effective for the intensity he brings to the quieter scenes. The fact that Slim’s temper tantrums seem childish rather than frightening has more to do with the direction than his abilities, and his southern accent comes and goes. As one might expect, Collett is most at home playing an extended drum riff and in singing the two songs in the play (for which he wrote the music).
Huras accomplishes the difficult task of making the bizarre character of Cavale, into a fully believable character. She is completely focussed on death and salvation – though not salvation through religion but through the ecstasy of rock and roll. As Cavale says a “rock-’n’-roll song can raise me higher than all of Revelations”. Huras has created just the right balance in Cavale between the oracular and the insane.
What does succeed is the set and costume design of Akiva Romer-Segal, who has created such a realistic pigsty of a bedroom that you can almost imagine the stink. She rightly makes Slim and Cavale look like they’ve lived in the same clothing for months. And the Lobster-Man suit is quite inventive given the material she has had to use.
Patti Smith and Sam Shepard fans will likely want to catch this odd souvenir of their life together and Shepard enthusiasts will be pleased to note how the Slim-Cavale relationship prefigures the Eddie-May relationship in one of his great plays, Fool for Love (1983). Fans of Jason Collet will, of course, want to cheer him on in this new endeavour. Like most of Shepard’s plays, Cowboy Mouth is an indictment of the idea of an “American Dream” where success is within reach of anyone who tries hard enough. Here the dream has become a delusion and leads to entrapment, not freedom. If only the direction had been able to make this point more clearly, we would have been able to see more glints of nascent greatness even in this flimsy sketch of a play.
©Christopher Hoile
Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.
Photo: Jason Collett and Jessica Huras. ©2013 Adam Moco.
For tickets, visit www.brownpapertickets.com/event/307488.
2013-01-31
Cowboy Mouth