The Cowboy Mouth Review

Cowboy Mouth

Through October 27 at the Yale Cabaret, 217 Park Street, New Haven. (203) 432-1566, www.yalecabaret.org

Director: Jackson Moran. Producer and Dramaturg: Tanya Dean. Set Designer: Meredith Ries. Costume Designer: Jayoung Yoon. Lighting Designer: Masha Tsimring. Sound Designer: Palmer. Stage Manager: Shannon L. Gaughf. Original Music: Mickey Theis. Performed by Michelle McGregor and Mickey Theis.

I’ve lived my whole life in college towns, so naturally I’ve seen more Cowboy Mouths than a Montana dentist. The play first crucified its rock & roll Jesus Off Broadway, in a heralded production co-starring its co-authors Patti Smith and Sam Shepard. Since then, however, the bedroom-bound raw romance has been a rite of passage for a certain type of student actor, the kind who embraces live loud rock–based realism because they can’t find that urgency in their theater history studies. (Usually it’s because they haven’t gotten to Artaud in the textbooks yet.)

It’s also not surprising that Cowboy Mouth has become the name of a popular rock band from New Orleans. (For the New Haven Theater Jerk list of “Bands Which Share Names With Sam Shepard Plays, go here.)

Cowboy Mouth is fast and loose and musical and hallucinogenic, but it is definitely a play, one that falls, structure- and style-wise, in between Harold Pinter’s intense one-act The Lover and Michael McClure’s outlaw/celebrity showdown The Beard. But it’s a play that only works if it has a lived-in quality that exists between its scripted lines. You have to fully believe, for instance, that the lead male character Slim expresses his inner feelings most deeply through his guitar playing (whether he plays the instrument well or not). Likewise, you have to believe that the female lead Cavale has absorbed the works of Baudelaire.

Above all, the highly physicalized passions of the piece can’t be faked. The actors have to fuck rather than writhe and smack each other rather than do an angry dance. Audiences need to be turned into voyeurs, lulled into the manic dialogue so that when the drama lurches from crappy apartment into dramatic absurdism, the shift is both natural and shocking.

This production (directed by Jackson Moran, so surehandedly that the shows seems not so much staged as set loose) is a deft mix of professionalism and devil-may-care. Meredith Ries’ set, an unkempt apartment, is kept at floor level, the better to capture the animalistic movements of the actors. Single-named sound designer Palmer offers atmospheric street-noise effects which flow in and out of the action. Masha Tsimring’s lighting designer stays away from stark or dark, and finds the shadows in the fast-moving action.

The designs ground, but can thankfully not contain or restrain, the show’s central performers. Michelle McGregor nails the pseudo-intellectualized lust of Cavale, idealizing her downtrodden existence and musing about her options in life. Mickey Theis strums his electric guitar and bashes his drum kit with rough glory, in a manner neither too punky nor too refined. He’s also written fresh music (as most productions of Cowboy Mouth do) to Smith & Shepard’s lyrics, a score that miraculously matches the stylistic matches the playwrights themselves exhibited in their respective bands (Smith as the vocalist for the Patti Smith Group, Shepard as a drummer with the Holy Modal Rounders). When Theis and McGregor duet late in the show, the tune is given a poppy Mickey & Sylvia ‘60s feel that evokes what the Patti Smith Group did with garage standards such as “Gloria” and “Land of a Thousand Dances.”

Best of all, the actors pound and stroke and lick and scrape and point and scream at each other without reservation, without pause, without distance. They just go at it, as they should.

So many Cowboy Mouths are vanity productions, ways for sullen 20somethings to scream at their parents about how they’re living in desperation and liking it. It’s amazing to find one that actually gets down and dirty while understanding the text, which grasps the spiritual and psychological aspects of this corrosive exercise in codependence.

Another treat for Cowboy Mouth connoisseurs: the Yale Cabaret’s version  takes a new slant on a certain crustacean incursion that finishes the play. As with so many elements in this fine, frenzied production, the choice is both respectful and surprising. This Cowboy Mouth knows what it’s talking about.