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There are heavies and then there are heavies. Rodeo bulls and fat people fall into the former, Jesus and Elvis the latter, and plopping all their weight onto one stage risks spectacular collapse. The dangers lie in the too-easy jokes of Chris Farley's observation that "fatty falls down and everyone goes home happy," and in the too-easy iconoclasm that comes with the use of symbolic giants as dramatic devices. In his latest play, Riding the Bull, August Schulenburg doesn't just find space for these 800lb. gorillas: he balances them deftly and suggests that their presence and importance to us aren't a result of their size but of our own meekness and longing. We don't need them for small reasons: we are small and need big things to keep us going, hoping we can get on their backs and ride away to a greater place. (A note: what we don't need right now is more bloody-the-sacred-cow opportunism, either in our public squares or our theaters. Vaguely political comedy is a big safe vogue today for the barely funny and lately political. Goofy dissent is in fashion, so keep your eyes open. Beware the mocking of "red states" or religion by comfortable people searching for their own gigs: it only helps said states ascend, degrading artistic standards as it goes.) Schulenburg sends us to the heart of Texas, and the expectation might be that the play will hand us a series of "look what these yokels are up to" ribs that have been done before and after Texas won the real game. But this is not that kind of play. Instead, Texas is simply door #1 in a chain of portals that leads us to our darkest spot, to the dusty ground where our dying lover's blood stains our jeans and the money is gone and wasn't worth it anyhow. With a keen use of "homespun" language and humor, Schulenburg takes us into the prairie funhouse of our present -- big clown faces drool on us, statues of the savior turn perverse, mad Kings from Memphis return from the dead for our mamas --and shows us how scary those places get when you can't find your way out. We begin with the musings of a beanpole mama's boy rodeo clown with a big head, GL Mitchell (Will Ditterline), and his randy first stumbles onto sin's slippery slope. A masturbation addiction (strangely fueled by the sirens in Sears-Roebuck catalogues) leads to sex in the barn with Fat Lyza (Liz Dailey), an overall-ed hellion of large appetites and foul mouth. Her devilish manipulations of the plastic Jesus and Mary in the town square bring the god-fearing GL to her, and he soon regrets it. GL loses his virginity in front of a cow that Lyza dresses up for kicks and the sparks fly funny from the get-go. Just as things get heated, Lyza cries out the name of a local bull rider. GL runs scared, sure that he's fallen afoul of the lord with a no-good, star-fucking atheist. Yet when he demands the truth from Lyza, she swears she didn't know the name before it came out. It appears a prophecy is at hand when the cowboy in question wins the next day's rodeo. GL and Lyza roll in the hay again, another winner's name pops out, and the duo hatches a scheme: GL will place bets on every name Lyza screams. A fuck-scream-bet-win cycle begins, and two misfits with nothing suddenly become very rich through copulation and gambling. From the beginning, we see that these two aren't stock characters from the Texas we might imagine. GL is a devout Catholic, setting him apart in a town full of Baptists, and injecting his faith with icon-worship and a need for confession (differences one would hope come in the way of the weird Evangelical-Catholic axis we're hearing so much about) that prove useful in the story's unfolding. Instead of the idealized Texan male of tough talk and temper, GL is a timid, whiny young man, a clown, not a bull rider. Lyza's mother was killed in a car accident, the vehicle later mauled by a vengeful bull and still sitting in her backyard. She walks and talks like a man, eats anything in sight, and swears like a sailor. She is a blown-up, exaggerated bitch from Willie Nelson's Texas, not some vacant-smile type happy to ride shotgun in the oil-bought Mercedes until it's time for child-rearing (again, these are the stereotypes we're used to, who knows where we get them?). Both characters are outsiders with barely concealed wounds, their gender roles somewhat reversed, their problems obvious but untended. Their rush toward riches is bolstered by Lyza's "fuck feeling bad" defiance and GL's need to care for and stay under the wing of his insane mother. "Life is short but wide," Lyza tells her scared lover, and they should enjoy the breadth and the bread while they can. GL's mother loves Elvis, singing "Love Me Tender" all night long, locked in her delusions somewhere off-stage. Interestingly enough, Bill Clinton's mother had the same obsession, though not to such a debilitating degree, and we can see to what lengths he went to please her. On the surface, Elvis may be the biggest, easiest symbol of Americana a writer can grab. We know what Elvis means: sweaty excess, wet-lipped sexuality, campy clothes, honky innocence defiled by drugs and fame. The King is a template too often slapped on and misused, and the real complexities of his character and life are left out in favor of mockery. In a defining decision, Schulenburg wisely leaves the King, like GL's mother, off-stage. We hear about him, we find him alive and demented in the shadows of Graceland, willing to please GL's mother for some of the gambling proceeds, but we don't see him. There is no moment where the Elvis impersonator enters and steals the show, and this omission makes all the difference. Schulenburg is still funny and the reference services his plot, but he's not interested in easy laughs or the usual pop-reference-as-crutch. Rather, Elvis is a phantom, a dream that drove GL's mother mad, then returned to her and made GL the perfect son, his sins necessary means to an end. Elvis is certainly a tool, but for the characters' salvation, not for lazy comedy: largesse as a creation of "the little people," the ones who need to be saved. It's this kind of canny employment of heavies that makes Riding the Bull about bigger things -- alienation, temptation, and the desire to conquer. If any icon looms larger than Elvis over our present culture, it's Jesus, and he's given us just as many good/bad songs, ugly imitators, and warped followers. In Riding the Bull, a cross hangs at center-rear stage and nativity scenes play a central role in the setting and plot turns. In the opening scene, GL scolds Lyza for taking the lord's name in vain like so many fictional rubes before him. His prudish squirming is familiar and funny. The scarier religion's sway over this country becomes, the more we try to laugh it off. But Schulenburg takes Christianity seriously, and it's this depth of understanding that ultimately makes this more than another cautionary tale. At the beginning of the play, GL wears his faith on his sleeve, concerning himself with confession and proper reverence. Lyza tells him she "ain't Christian," and soon enough he's doing very "un-Christian" things with her at least 3 times a day for hot betting tips. Greed soils his tongue, lacing his speech with curses and vain use of the lord's name. If we watched GL alone, we'd see only the shallow hold religion has on its followers in the face of money and sex. Schulenburg doesn't settle for that. Instead, Lyza gets religion after the gold rush, first through a vision during one of her sessions with GL, and then through the miraculous resurrections of her cow, Cyndi (named after Cyndi Lauper, who famously sang "money changes everything"). Unsatisfied with excess, Lyza begins to seek a higher meaning from her life, something to put order to her new life. The change is convincing because Dailey transforms, seems to glow with a newfound belief, shedding the old Lyza's crass front for the believer's pacific confidence. We see that she's discovered beauty in life, even if it lies in an electrocuted cow dressed in a pillbox hat. It's this switch that drives GL to jealousy and destruction, and the play to a fuller complexity and originality. Faith -- in change and redemption-- is why religion continues to move people, not small-minded Belief with it's outdated texts and cries of, "shame!" Still, none of this would be so convincing if not for expert direction by Kelly O'Donnell. The play moves forward precisely, the actors constantly evolving and coming at each other, never wasting their breath. Again, we aren't presented with novelties here but with an original treatment of long-disputed issues. Ditterline's mastery of his character is never in doubt. You never find yourself saying, "Is this guy too 'Texan,' or not 'Texan' enough?" Instead, you watch him fall and mourn another lost innocent, forget the accent. Dailey fills up her overalls and intimidates you, then settles into a soft sainthood, and we remember that both sides can fit into one character. The play is extremely fortunate for the set design of Jason Paradine. The ramshackle quality of the set matches well with Schulenburg's world and the lighting is outstanding and essential. Drifting like smoke throughout the play, the original score by the American String Conspiracy lends an authenticity and density to the developments onstage, fitting seamlessly with the central themes and accentuating their twists. We will suffer heartily if we lose touch with the specifics of America, its crevices as well as its monuments. We should ponder its failed dreamers as much as its brassy victors. Religion may outlive our laughter, but we might outrun its fanatics if we understand what they cling to in our rattling world, and why. And we should all think more about Elvis. Riding the Bull is up to all these challenges because it creates its own Faulknerian "postage stamp of land" and makes the odd lives lived there seem possible, in all the hope and damnation our very real places give birth to every day, on and on. "Riding
the Bull" Copyright © 2005 by theater2k.com. All rights reserved. |
