The Dove Hunters present:
“THE SAD LAMENT OF PECOS BILL, ON THE EVE OF KILLING HIS WIFE”
a Surrealist Western Musical by Sam Shepard, with music by Catherine Stone
Can a legend die 'Or worse, slowly fade away into irrelevance' A musical postcard from the inner landscape of the Old West, The Sad Lament of Pecos Bill mourns the obsolescence of heroes, showing them transfixed as relics in the mythic junkyard of American popular culture.
Pecos Bill was written by the Pulitzer Prize-winning Sam Shepard (“the most original humourous poet in the American theatre,” according to the New Yorker), and Catherine Stone in collaboration with music / theatre co-op The Overtones, and has been rarely performed since it’s debut in 1976 at the Bay Area Playwrights Festival in San Francisco. The New York Times hailed its “mythical whimsy” while the New Yorker found it “haunting, funny, enriching.” Here Shepard mingles past, present and future into a pastiche of legend and actuality.
Featuring the eponymous cowboy comic-book icon legendary for creating Texas, wrangling tornados and digging the Rio Grande - not to mention his mighty stimulatin’ catfish-riding bride - this new production of Pecos Bill boasts evocative new musical arrangements and improvisations, and the weathered look of medicine shows and ghost towns.
The play takes place after Pecos Bill shoots his brand new bride Sluefoot Sue after she takes an ill-fated ride on his bucking bronco Widowmaker. The couple perform a spirited and tragic series of songs (Sue’s dead, “but sings anyway”) that ask “Why is we both dyin’ on this land”' Shepard has them confront their own status as caricature - as Disney-esque cliches “rotten in the memory of man”. Where cowboys were once revered in the public imagination, when justice was served with a six shooter, when the land was tamed by the hand of man, Pecos Bill is now himself bewildered by a modern world full of menace, television and shopping.
However, Pecos Bill is most of all an elegy to an authenticity that never was. The wild west, with all of its return-to-the-land romanticism, still influences popular culture today - especially at a time of chicken coops in Grey Lynn. But that Old West authenticity was itself a kind of ‘fakelore’. Pecos Bill’s adventures weren’t told around campfires by 19th century pioneers - in fact they were first dreamt-up for a New York magazine by one Edward O’Reilly in the early 20th century.
Pecos Bill’s Auckland run at the Basement Theatre is the brainchild of The Dove Hunters, a cooperative of actors and musicians. Sluefoot Sue is played by Colleen Davis (known in NZ from the Almost a Bird Theatre Collective, the Dust Palace, Auckland Theatre Company productions of Oliver and Cabaret, and an accomplished jazz and blues singer). Bill is played by Barnie Duncan, who recently appeared in Dog Sees God at the Basement Theatre and is the singer with Auckland band the Hot Grits. The mise-en-scene is by Sophie Roberts (artistic co-director of the Almost a Bird Theatre Collective, director ofDog Sees God, Blinkers, and Mr Marmalade). The band includes contemporary composer Hermione Johnson, jazz drummer and improviser Chris O’Connor (SJD, Don McGlashan), blues singer and guitarist Tom Rodwell (Storehouse) and avant-guitarist extraordinaire Phill Dryson (Benka Boradovsky Bordello Band, Meatbix).
