LATE: A COWBOY SONG Piven Theatre
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Doublemindedness is required to appreciate what Ruhl tries and fails to accomplish in this warmhearted but underdeveloped portrait of a marriage between two childhood sweethearts—Mary and Crick (Noonan and Lawrence Grimm), whose relationship shifts when a former school chum, Red (Kelli Simpkins), reenters Mary’s life. Toss in a just-this-side-of-exploitative plotline about Mary and Crick’s newborn intersex baby and Ruhl’s desire to map the borders between male and female, friend and lover, even city and country, becomes clear—though the map itself can get cartoonish at points.
The city/country split is illustrated by Red’s career choice. She’s a singing cowboy (not “cowgirl”) whose laid-back, fearless approach to life seems to soothe Mary’s tattered nerves as much as her songs—cunning tunes by Amy Warren—soothe the horses she tames.
What we do need is a clearer sense of how Crick and Mary’s hermaphroditic baby, Blue, affects how they view each other and Red. The doctors make Blue a female at birth, but as the name Mary picks for her attests—Crick calls her Jill, telling Mary, “I don’t want my daughter living on a fence”—she doesn’t understand why it’s necessary to choose a fixed gender for the child. At one point Mary writes Blue a letter, telling her that if she should happen to feel other than female as she grows up, she’s not crazy. It’s a terrific, emotionally naked moment. But it doesn’t mitigate the fact that the invisible child has more to do with a playwright’s need for a symbol of ambiguity than with the role all children play in redefining their parents.
