I Was There and You Weren't #3
Even Cowgirls Get the Blues
World Premiere of the Stage Version of Tom Robbins'
The World Premiere of the Stage Version of Tom Robbins' Even Cowgirls Get the Blues
By Michael Dare
The new Seattle production of Even Cowgirls Gets the Blues hits the same cosmic gong of enlightenment the book did, making you laugh and think in equal proportions. It's out of the ballpark, never less than outrageously entertaining while remaining extremely faithful to the anarchic spirit of the original book. This was especially true of the world premiere at the Seattle Center, right there under the Space Needle, next to the 60's amusement park that stands as an everlasting tribute to amusement technology gone by. The attendance of Tom Robbins, inserted into the play - very much as he inserted himself into his novel - brought the whole thing into startling 4D perspective.
The Book-It Repertory Theatre Company accepted an incredibly specific and arduous task when they decided to translate the counterculture lunacy of Robbins' 1976 novel to the stage. He once described his novels as pomegranates, you don't wolf them down like an apple, you savor each morsel, each sentence, the kernels are too strong to take all at once. A Robbins novel deliberately slows you down as he takes unimaginable tangents from whatever you thought the plot was. As soon as the first amoeba dripped down the reader's leg, it either pissed them off or astonished them. Who knew there were so many rules of writing yet to be broken. Robbins took you places no novel had gone before, places impossible for any other medium to follow.
Surely you remember Chapter 100 of Even Cowgirls Get the Blues, in which the author simply offers an imaginary toast between you and he, two glasses of champagne, in simple celebration of the fact that together, you've made it all the way to the 100th chapter of this absurd book, in which the fact that it is a novel is merely an excuse to celebrate the written word in all its manifestations, as though Chapter 100 had been waiting in the wings for every novelist to di
scover but none had the audacity to come right out and allow it to happen, for the novel itself to be self-aware and proud as hell of having made it all the way to triple digits in the chapter department.
Tom Robbins makes you aware of the act of reading while you're reading in order to promote the entire idea of self awareness, to give higher and higher perspectives upon relative absurdities of plot. He never takes anything more seriously than his desire to enlighten, like Penn and Teller, two other magicians who deliberately undermine their own magic tricks just to increase your perspective on reality. If you're reading a Tom Robbins book and someone interrupts asking what the book is about, your answer would be completely different chapter to chapter, page to page, paragraph to paragraph, even sentence to sentence. Cowgirls was completely original and hilarious, always playing tricks on you, never letting you be satisfied by simply sitting back and watching the plot go by, as if the plot itself were an afterthought, something to be gotten back to after tripping out about the nature of the moon.
It took a while for Kurt Vonnegut Jr. to reach the same stylistic conclusions Tom Robbins embraced from the get-go. Vonnegut's early novels were straight-forward sci-fi, and it wasn't until Slaughterhouse Five and the incredible Breakfast of Champions (another cinematic tragedy worthy of the Book-It treatment) that he broke down the fourth wall with the same fervor Germans used to pull down the one in Berlin. Other than Stephen King inserting himself into The Dark Tower, it's a technique few novelists have dared to gamble with, and for good reason. Readers of novels don't really want to be reminded they're reading a book, any more than watchers of movies want to be reminded they're watching a movie. They want to get so involved they forget where they are.
That can't happen with a play. You can't be so involved in a theatrical production you forget you're sitting
in a theater watching actors and sets and costumes that are live right in front of you, so this production takes that foregone conclusion and runs with it, constantly talking directly to the audience, letting us know they know we're here, acknowledging right up front that the whole production is for us. The novel does the same thing with words, so Cowgirls turns out to be the perfect book to exploit this theatrical technique to its fullest.
Even so, there are parts of the book that can't possibly be translated into any other medium, amazing literary tricks that can only be appreciated through the written word.
There's a character in the book named the Countess, and you, the reader, presume the Countess to be a woman until suddenly and mysteriously, halfway through the book, the author drops the word "he" in reference to the Countess and the reader goes "huh?" and rereads the entire book again up to that point, realizing a magic trick has just been pulled, that the author cleverly never used the pronouns "he" or "she" in reference to the Countess, that the author was counting on you to assume it was a woman, to force you to face your own sexual prejudices by springing upon you the sad fact that the whole movie you had going on in your head concerning the Countess and their relationship with Sissy Hankshaw was dependent upon the author using the word "their" instead of "his" in endless sentences such as this.
There's really no way to put that in a play or movie. As soon as the character of the Countess is introduced, you're pretty much going to know he's a "he," but in the book that wasn't so.
It's a subject I know way too much about, so as you can guess, I was prepared to hate this version of Cowgirls even more than I detested the film version by Gus Van Sant. Somewhere in the effort to translate Cowgirls to the silver screen, someone decided this heterosexual paean to female sexuality needed a gay director, mysteriously deciding upon the brilliant but utterly humorless G
us Van Sant. You can take all the laughs in every Van Sant Film, fit them in a flea's navel, and still have room for a hard cover copy of Infinite Jest. Van Sant systematically stripped the book of everything whimsical in a misguided attempt to give the whole thing an impossible sense of realism, forgetting there isn't one realistic moment in any of Robbins' magical books.
But this production pulls the rabbit out of the hat, finding just the right quirks of theatricality to match the quirks of the book. If you don't like this production of Cowgirls, chances are it's because you don't like the book in the first place, it's that faithful a reproduction.
As far as I'm concerned, as soon as Cowgirls is an over the top comedy, a flat out farce, everything fits in place. This production, superbly adapted by Jennifer Sue Johnson and directed by Russ Banham, combines a variety of theatrical techniques, including vaudeville, commedia dell'arte, and most importantly, Paul Sill's Story Theater, which allows them to simply read the book to the audience while acting it out.
It's so simple, it's become commonplace, you've seen it a million times, the theatrical device whereby each character narrates their own story and the stories of others on stage, while simultaneously becoming the people they're talking about, going in and out of character at the drop of a hat, much like a Greek Chorus in which each chorus member gets to play the lead once in a while. No one had done it before Paul Sill's Story Theater, which told tales from the Brothers Grimm. It was simply the most economical means of storytelling the stage had ever seen, appearing first at the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles in 1971, moving from there to Broadway, where it was just as big a theatrical revelation as Tom's books were literary revelations years later. Ovid's Metamorphosis followed, proving the technique would work with just about anything, even in 1980 in a Royal Shakespeare Company production o
f Charles Dickens' Nicholas Nickleby where they did the whole book, every character, every chapter, every sub-plot, every nuance, over six hours, seen on two different nights, in Story Theater fashion, just reading the book to you while acting it out.
Following in this classic tradition, this production of Even Cowgirls Get the Blues sets the record straight, letting the story go its goofy and ridiculous way with a style in between commedia dell'arte and cosmic circus, letting us know the universe is a funny place where serious things happen, or a serious place where funny things happen, a quirky point of view with every nuance perfected. Story theater lets them incorporate everything from standard Greek chorus to vaudeville, whatever the story calls for, a comedy with plenty of time to get seriously philosophical in between the yocks. This is just the right way to do Tom Robbins for the stage, and everyone involved should be proud as hell.
What's it about? The nutshell? When you try to boil it all down, you're left with FBI agents, whooping cranes, big thumbs, and the first amoeba, not to mention the nature of time and space and everything in between, but mainly Sissy Hankshaw. She's the spokes-model for a feminine hygiene deodorant spray with phallic thumbs who gets involved with a bunch of cowgirls fighting for the rights of whooping cranes, who teach her that the scent of a woman is nothing to be embarrassed about, indeed, it's one of their finest points, which they have no problem sharing with the world, leading to an incredibly funny nude scene in which all the cowgirls chase off the Countess in horror at the sight of their unscented bushiness.
Two narrators play guitar and violin, the perfect accompaniment, Barbara Lamb and Jo Miller, like Nat King Cole and Stubby Kaye in Cat Ballou, telling the story through song, underscoring all the ridiculous events that ensue.
Kate Czajkowski plays Sissy goofy and innocent, not an obvious choice, but the right on
e, keeping the laughs coming as her big thumbs set her life on the road. The set is an old truckstop, the type hitchhikers get stuck at, with hubcaps and license plates covering the walls, and an ice machine that doubles as a cave for The Chink, played to lunatic perfection by Wesley Rice as a variation on Dr. Pangloss from Candide, a looney philosopher horndog who can't keep his hands off the cowgirls, and who can blame him.
Ellen Barkin would make quite a cowgirl, and so does Hilary Pickles as Bonanza Jellybean, a wacked-out R. Crumb caricature of a character, the cutest button of a cowgirl at the Rubber Rose ranch who plants a smack on Sissy's mouth that changes her life.
The rest of the cast is just right, Brian Thompson a hilarious Countess, and every cowgirl a potential Lucille Ball, and that might seem a strange way to go with it but no, comediennes is precisely what this story needed. They're not really "lesbians," a word that doesn't show up till halfway through, and not in a nice way. Sissy ain't no lesbian, she just can't turn down sex from both the Chink and Bonanza Jellybean, regardless of their stereotypes, they both get her off.
The premiere provided the actual presence of Tom Robbins, who hadn't read the book himself in 33 years, which made it all the more entertaining for him, constantly reminding him of lines he'd forgotten he'd written. Tom appears as a character in the book Even Cowgirls Get the Blues, so seeing him sitting down the row from you when one of the characters says "Hey, who wrote this book?", a moment in which he appeared in the play as himself, very much as he appeared in the book as himself, was a genius moment just for that audience, right then, gone forever, unrepeatable, and I wish you could have been there, but don't let that stop you from seeing it without that moment. If you can see it, see it. If you can't see it, read it.
This production doesn't make the big mistake of the film, turning Robbins' hilarious fantasy lesbians on the
range into serious politically correct spokesdykes for the righteous homosexual cause. These cowgirls are all perfectly ludicrous, individual characters that add up to a comic book whole, and a Zapp Comic at that. The play has a lusty and zestful fixation on the female crotch, which could be one reason the book is such a classic, the clearly visceral response the author has towards the commercial exploitation of feminine hygiene, which was just getting started at the end of the '70s, when the airwaves were mysteriously full of ads for different spray products for women, as ubiquitous and strange as the current spate of ads for boner pills for men. Cowgirls is as far away from the guilt ridden gay cowboy angst of Brokeback Mountain as humanly possible, putting the gay back in the word gay, leaving out none of the feminist rhetoric, but coming from these ridiculous characters, right out of a Coen brothers or Tim Burton film, in which TONE is everything.
The Book-It Repertory Theatre is a non-profit organization dedicated to "transforming great literature into great theatre through simple and sensitive production and inspiring its audiences to read." It's been going on for a miraculous 19 years I'm sorry I missed. If they were all as good as this, they're one of the most important theatrical companies in the country, translating hundreds of pieces of untranslatable material through the sieve of the perfect theatrical device for translating just about anything. They've got it down, completely perfected, I can't imagine a book I wouldn't want to see their production of.
Of course I could be wrong. This is the only production I've ever seen from the Book-It Repertory Company. Maybe they do EVERYTHING like this, appropriate or not, and I just happened to catch the one where it fit, in which case their upcoming Moby Dick is going to be very interesting.
"A sense of humor, properly developed, is superior to any religion so far devised."
- Tom Robbins: Jitterbug Perfume -
Tom Robbins' EVEN COWGIRLS GET THE BLUES
Playing September 16-October 12, 2008 at the Center House Theatre
Book-It Repertory Theatre
206-216-0877, ext. 100
dareland.blogspot.com
The Weekly Poll
This week's poll is... the Paul Newman 'Tribute' edition
What are your favorite Paul Newman movies and why?
I'd list them all for you to choose from, but why? You know what they are! You relish the memories of seeing them for the first time. You've looked forward to seeing them again and again since then... So, unload... Let it out... Let us remember a man who was not only a great actor, but a marvelous philanthropist and loyal husband, as well.
BadtotheboneBob
Send your responses to BadtotheBoneBob (BCEpoll (at) aol.com)
Recommended Reading
from Bruce
The Rich Are Staging a Coup This Morning ...a message from Michael Moore
After stealing a half trillion dollars to line the pockets of their war-profiteering backers for the past five years, after lining the pockets of their fellow oilmen to the tune of over a hundred billion dollars in just the last two years, Bush and his cronies -- who must soon vacate the White House -- are looting the U.S. Treasury of every dollar they can grab. They are swiping as much of the silverware as they can on their way out the door.
Paul Krugman: The 3 A.M. Call (nytimes.com)
The next president will likely have to deal with some major financial emergencies. Barack Obama seems well informed. John McCain, on the other hand, scares me.
VICTORIA A. BROWNWORTH: Mean Girls Never Grow Up (curvemag.com)
They just get new screen names. That's where the problem begins.
Dahlia Lithwick: Paul Newman (slate.com)
HE USED HIS FAME TO GIVE AWAY HIS FORTUNE.
Roger Ebert: "Paul Newman: In memory"
Paul Newman, a sublime actor and a good man, is dead at 83. The movie legend died Friday at his home in Connecticut, a family spokeswoman said. The cause of death was lung cancer. Newman reportedly told his family he chose to die at home.
Roger Ebert: Newman's zone
I really liked this movie, I told Paul Newman. "Thank you," he said. There was one reaction shot you had, when she lifted up her sweater, teasing you - an old friend, but still a possible lover. The audience really loved you at that moment. You seemed kind of embarrassed and delighted and ...
Alec Baldwin: A Great Actor (huffingtonpost.com)
You can think about him hobbling on a crutch, feigning indifference, while Elizabeth Taylor urged him on in her lingerie. The two most beautiful actors in all of film, and they just argued.
Trish Bendix: Interview with Tegan Quin (afterellen.com)
The musician talks about Tegan and Sara's new video, and why she doesn't bring girlfriends on tour with her.
RANDALL ROBERTS: "CONFESSIONS OF A PROMO-CD JUNKIE: WHO WILL STOP THE MUSIC INDUSTRY GRAVY TRAIN?" (laweekly.com)
With so much music available at the click of a mouse, do tastemakers really need hard copies anymore? Is it worth the waste?
Teresa Ortega: Interview With Alisa Valdes-Rodriguez (afterellen.com)
Alisa Valdes-Rodriguez talks her Dirty Girls sequel, and being bisexual.
David Bruce: Wise Up! Good Deeds (athensnews.com)
Her Dollywood is a place where gays can go - they make up a portion of her fan base. An important charity she started is the Imagination Library. She chooses an impoverished area, and then gives all the children in that area a hardback book of his or her own each month from their birth until they are five years old. The charity started in Tennessee, but has since expanded across the United States, including all Native American reservations, and Canada and Great Britain. As of 2008, she had given away over 11 million books. To most people, Dolly Parton is the Queen of Country Music. To many, many children, she is the Book Lady.
Hubert's Poetry Corner
Professor George W. Bush
Flubber - or just flubbing?
Reader Comment
Re: Palin
Dear Marty,
I am reconsidering voting against Palin. The level of entertainment
from one who makes Quayle look like a Rhodes Scholar is becoming
increasingly hard to resist.
Willow
Thanks, Willow!
Ah, yes, the 'Burn, Galatica, Burn' option. ; )
Reader Comment
Re: palin graft
Marty-
Here's a little story about Palin taking favors
Vic in Ak
Thanks, Vic!
Selected Readings
from that Mad Cat, JD
In The Chaos Household
Last Night
Warmer and more humid.
Super Bowl Halftime
Bruce Springsteen
Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band will perform at the 2009 Super Bowl halftime show in Tampa, Fla., the NFL and NBC announced Sunday night.
Continuing a run of major talent that has lately included the Rolling Stones, U2, Paul McCartney, Prince and Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, the biggest television event in the nation will showcase one of its most beloved rock 'n' roll artists. The Super Bowl will be played Feb. 1 at Raymond James Stadium.
The 2008 Super Bowl show was watched by more than 148 million viewers in the U.S., the NFL said in its release. It wasn't always that way: For years, the game's halftime show was made up of local and college marching bands and drill teams.
Bruce Springsteen
Rules Out Led Zeppelin Reunion
Robert Plant
Former Led Zeppelin lead singer Robert Plant has put paid to persistent rumors that the British rock giants were planning to reunite for a tour.
Band insiders have said that Plant, who is touring the United States with Alison Krauss, has been the most reluctant to get back together, and a statement on his website on Monday made clear his intentions.
"Robert Plant and Alison Krauss are currently touring the USA on the last leg of their 'Raising Sand' tour," he said, adding that the tour finished on October 5.
"After those dates, Robert has no intention whatsoever of touring with anyone for at least the next two years.
Robert Plant
NYC Opera Commissions Work
Philip Glass
Philip Glass has been commissioned by New York City Opera to compose an opera that imagines the final months in the life of Walt Disney.
The opera, "The Perfect American," is based on a recent novel by the American-born writer Peter Stephan Jungk in which a fictional Austrian cartoonist who worked for Disney in the 1940s-50s recounts the story of the legendary founder of the Walt Disney Company.
It will open City Opera's 2012-2013 season and honor the composer's 75th birthday, City Opera's incoming General Manager Gerard Mortier announced Monday.
Philip Glass
Contested Sale Bombs In London
Banksy
A British auction house says it has failed to find buyers for five contested pieces of street art purportedly created by aerosol impresario Banksy.
The auction at Lyon & Turnbull follows a statement posted to a Web site affiliated with the British artist warning that some pieces were being falsely attributed to Banksy, whose identity has never been confirmed.
Pest Control says it refuses to authenticate street art because Banksy likes the work to remain in place. Ben Hanly, Lyon & Turnbull's contemporary art expert, said Monday that the pieces were genuine and that the sale fell through due to economic reasons.
Banksy
Extends Strong Ratings Run
'SNL'
"Saturday Night Live" continues to go on a ratings tear, thanks in part to another appearance by Tina Fey as Sarah Palin and Chris Parnell as presidential debate moderator Jim Lehrer.
"SNL" was the highest-rated program of the night on broadcast TV.
The show averaged a 6.0 overnight rating/15 share in the metered markets, Nielsen Media Research said Sunday afternoon. That's up 46 percent from the 4.1/10 of the previous season's third telecast, on October 13, 2007. It also marks a ratings gain of 52 percent compared with the first three episodes of last season, which began later than "SNL" did this year.
'SNL'
Another TV Series
Jesse Ventura
Jesse Ventura will be working on a new conspiracy-theory series for truTV.
Production of a pilot featuring Ventura begins next month. The project comes from A. Smith & Co. Productions, which also produces "Hell's Kitchen" and "Trading Spaces."
Ventura will travel the country, investigating cases and getting input from believers and skeptics before passing judgment on a theory's validity.
Jesse Ventura
Insurance Firm Sued Over Nonpayment
Heath Ledger
Heath Ledger's insurance company has been sued in Los Angeles for not paying out $10 million in benefits to his daughter, claiming the actor may have committed suicide, according to court papers.
The 28-year-old Australian star of "Brokeback Mountain" and "The Dark Knight" was found dead in his New York apartment in January in what officials ruled was an accidental death from an overdose of painkillers and other medicines.
But lawyers for the ReliaStar insurance company, where Ledger took out a life insurance policy in 2007, have claimed his death was suspicious and possibly a suicide. That would nullify the policy, said the court papers posted on celebrity website TMZ.com.
Heath Ledger
Question Palin's Support
Alaska Natives
Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin routinely notes her husband's Yup'ik Eskimo roots. But those connections haven't erased doubts about her in a community long slighted by the white settlers who flocked to Alaska and dominate its government.
Since she took office in 2006, many Alaska Natives say they've felt ignored when she made appointments to her administration, sided with sporting interests over Native hunting rights and pursued a lawsuit that Natives say seeks to undermine their ancient traditions.
Alaska's population today is mostly white but nearly a fifth of its people are Native Americans - primarily Alaska Natives. Blacks and Asians combined make up less than 10 percent of the state's population.
Early in her administration, Palin created a furor by trying to appoint a white woman to a seat, held for more than 25 years by a Native, on the panel that oversees wildlife management. Ultimately, Palin named an Athabascan Indian to the game board, but not before relations were bruised.
Alaska Natives
Serving 60 Days
Mindy McCready
Country singer Mindy McCready will surrender to authorities in Franklin, Tennessee, on Tuesday to begin serving a 60-day sentence for violating her probation on a 2004 drug charge.
McCready's deal with Williamson County prosecutors was announced by her attorney.
The 32-year-old singer was charged in June with violating her probation by falsifying her community service records.
Mindy McCready
Travel Ban
Gary Glitter
A British court has banned convicted paedophile and 1970s glam rocker Gary Glitter from travelling to France and Spain, it emerged on Monday.
A magistrates court imposed the ban, which runs until March 25, at a hearing last Thursday following a request from the police, the court said.
The 64-year-old was the dazzling king of the over-the-top glam era, complete with extravagant make-up, bouffant wigs, silver jumpsuits and high boots.
He sold more then 20 million records and had a string of stomping hits like "I'm The Leader Of The Gang (I Am)" and "Rock and Roll (Parts 1 and 2)."
Gary Glitter
Special Prosecutor For Special Repugs
Nora Dannehy
Attorney General Michael Mukasey on Monday appointed a prosecutor to examine potential criminal charges in the Justice Department's firings of nine federal prosecutors after an inquiry found evidence several of the dismissals were politically motivated.
The appointment of Nora Dannehy, a federal prosecutor in Connecticut, came as the department released an inspector general's report that found former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales had "abdicated" his responsibility in the matter.
The report also said several White House officials, including resident George W. Bush's former top political aide Karl Rove, were unwilling to be interviewed by investigators about the firings.
Dannehy would have to power to subpoena witnesses such as Rove who did not cooperate with inspector general's probe, and her appointment revives the controversy over the firings just as Sen. John McCain is seeking to extend the Republican hold on the U.S. presidency in November elections.
Nora Dannehy
Sued By Merv Griffin's Company
Ed McMahon
Court documents show a company founded by Merv Griffin is suing Ed McMahon for a $100,000 loan it claims has gone unpaid.
The Griffin Group Inc. claims it loaned the money to McMahon, Johnny Carson's sidekick on the "Tonight" show, in 2005. The company filed the suit on Thursday and states that none of the loan has been repaid.
McMahon's publicist didn't directly address the lawsuit, instead asking, "Anybody wanna buy a nice house in The Summit?"
The quote is an allusion to McMahon's hilltop home, which is facing foreclosure. The former pitchman also faces numerous other lawsuits filed on behalf of creditors.
Ed McMahon
Another Repug Criminal
Kyle "Dusty" Foggo
A former third-ranking official at the CIA pleaded guilty on Monday to fraud charges related to accusations he improperly steered agency contracts to his best friend, the Justice Department said.
The CIA's former executive director, Kyle "Dusty" Foggo, admitted steering contracts to friend Brent Wilkes, who already is serving a 12-year sentence for bribing former Republican Congressman Randall "Duke" Cunningham, the department said.
The indictment against Foggo said that while they were working on a water-supply contract Wilkes treated Foggo and his family to a Scotland vacation that included $12,000 in private jet flights, $4,000 for a helicopter ride to a round of golf, and $44,000 for an estate stay that included trout and salmon fishing, archery and clay pigeon shooting.
Foggo and Wilkes later took a $32,000 vacation to Haleiwa, Hawaii, it said.
Kyle "Dusty" Foggo
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