KDHX Theatre Review - Cowboy Logic
Reviewed by Mark Bretz
It’s tough growing up in Oklahoma. It’s tougher still growing up gay in the land of the Marlboro Man, where you’re expected to ‘cowboy up’ and take whatever challenges life throws at you with chin firmly jutted out.
Jerrold Rabushka’s Cowboy Logic, which opened last weekend [November 9, 2001] at the St. John’s United Methodist Church theater, shows us six characters in search of an author who can reassure them that everything will be OK. Unfortunately, as we all know, no one can make such an assurance.
Rabushka has chosen a rather bizarre setting for his original play. Envision if you can a restaurant titled “The Ship Yard” in the middle of Sand Springs, Oklahoma, and a restaurant that specializes in Indonesian cuisine at that. Talk about life’s challenges.
Anyway, co-owner Molly (played by Kelli Motanagh) has left her native Nova Scotia to reunite with her dad, who abandoned his family a long ways back, and also to escape an unhappy love affair. She keeps to her business at the Ship Yard, aided by a talkative waitress named Alice (Regina Drury). Alice is concerned that her husband Jeff (Mike Wolf) is paying more attention to crafting furniture than in embellishing their marriage.
The Ship Yard is happened upon one day by two agreeable if aimless cowboys named Lannie and Calhoun, played by Stephen J. Heffernan and Rabushka, respectively. They’re also fraternal twins, and Calhoun is gay to boot, or cowboy boot, I suppose. Calhoun, who is aggravated by his brother’s penchant for telling strangers that Calhoun is gay, is smitten with a young man named Haney (Sean Walton), who at 19 is a dozen years his junior.
As Lannie sees Calhoun drifting away from him, he sizes up Molly as a likely replacement to fill his lonely existence. Rabushka spends a good part of the play’s two acts unveiling Lannie’s awkward and unsatisfying courtship of Molly, along with a side development of Calhoun tutoring Jeff in the fine craft of furniture making, with the implication of perhaps a bit more before a resolution of sorts that finishes the play.
Brett Boreck directs the production in straightforward fashion, with adequate performances from his cast, highlighted by Heffernan’s portrayal of the uncertain Lannie, and Rabushka’s own peculiar interpretation of Calhoun, kind of a cross between Gomer Pyle and the old comic strip character Tumbleweeds.
Skip Hardesty contributes lighting, sound and set design, and Rabushka has written some nifty country western tunes, with emphasis on the ‘western,’ to provide some pleasant background effects.
