In the beginning, there was Red Meat Substitutes. Me, Ron Owens, Laura McCord, Henry Mark, Richard Davis, and Victoria Safriet filled the vacuum that was Tulsa's theatre avaunt guarde with inspired lunacy. Texarkana Waltz begain life as a Red Meat play. Red Meat's past is a future blog, but our impact can be summed up with a story.
Bret Masterson, a later day Red Meater, threw parties that were minor miracles. In Tulsa, of all God-forbidden, east of Eden places, one could count on a Masterson fete being interesting, often dramatic, and fueled by booze of a quality and quantity that even now brings tears to my eyes. A few years after moving to Seattle I went back to Tulsa, happy to be the excuse Bret needed to host a soiree. That evening I met a newcomer.
I can't remember his name, so let's call him Lucky. Lucky and I struck up a conversation. He was home from school where he studied acting. Acting? No shit. Why the fuck study acting? Once upon a time, he told me, his eyes growing misty, when he was in high school there was a theatre company called Red Meat Substitutes. He told me how remarkable they were, daring, dangerous even, how he's an actor because of Red Meat Substitutes.
Red Meat Substitutes? Never heard of them. Tell me more.
At first I was honored and proud, what I imagined Bob Dylan, confronted by a disciple, might feel were he human and not the Poet-Deity of our age. Then I realized our true impact. If our little theatre troupe inspired this young man to pursue a life in the theatre, how many other lives had we ruined?
Such is the power of unbridled passion and youth.
For one of our last Red Meat shows, Back from the Dead, 1988, Ron wrote a beautiful little play, Madam Palma's House of Psychic Head Readings, about Madam Palma, her niece, Angel, and an injured stranger, David - think Glass Menagerie meets Twilight Zone. Laura McCord's Madam Palma was brilliant, and I loved her relationship with Angel. For our next and second to last Read Meat show, True Love, 1989, I borrowed Ron's characters for my contribution, The Sad Lament of Eddie Wickett on the Night of His Execution (props to Sam Shepard).
Eddie, the electric chair and one of Texarkana's key riffs, "De doi de doi de doi, de hun dee dud!" I borrowed from Henry Mark's Head Trip, one of the funniest, nastiest short plays ever written. The electric chair also references Sam Shepard's Killer's Head. Clearly, I had a Sam thing.
In Sad Lament, Madam Palma's niece, Angel, is Eddie's penitentiary pen-pal wife. On the night of Eddie's execution, at the moment of his death, Madam Palma attempts to join Angel and Eddie's souls in eternity. She fails, and Angel ends the play crying out repeatedly for Eddie, lost forever in nothingness, fade to black.
Flash forward three years to Seattle, 1992. As a result of gainful underemployment and the recent death of my mother, I was moved to take up writing again. Sad Lament was my best work to date (after a performance I'd overheard the woman behind me describe it as perfect, so I was inclined to think it perfect but short), so I decided to turn it into a full length play.
Six years later, Madam Palma and Angel are gone, cowboys have joined the cast, and Texarkana Waltz opens in L. A to the kind of reviews you'd give ten years of your life to get (see Playwright on my Web site). It sold. Audiences laughed and cried. It was nominated for four Ovation Awards, one for writing. It was a hit.
In 2000, it was a hit in Seattle.
In New York, 2002, it bombed. Before I get to why, a few words about the script.
Texarkana Waltz is not the greatest play ever written, it has its flaws, but it is a moving, compelling, engaging and magical two hours of entertainment. My primary goal is to entertain - all else follows. I've seen a lot of plays in my day, most unbearably boring, entertainment clearly not a priority. Most plays are academic, a thesis that can be neatly summed up in a short paragraph, the better for grant applications. I'm an entertainer of the old school - Wow 'em! I set out to write a revolutionary, popular entertainment, to strike the balance between art and commerce, and I succeeded in two out of three productions.
The L. A. and Seattle productions were very similar. Same director, Alison Narver, same designer, Gary Smoot, and most of the same cast. For both, everything came together - the script, direction, design, music and cast were transcendent. The wheel was tweaked, not reinvented.
The New York production was radically different. It was bad. It deserved a good beating. The critics blamed me, the writer. Critics are poor, ignorant bastards deserving of our pity. They should all be put down. They never get the fact that a play isn't the script, it's the sum of its parts.
Texarkana Waltz died in New York because the producers, smart, successful, lovely women I love for taking a chance on an unknown first timer, among other qualities and virtues, never had a prayer. Texarkana's only chance for success would've been to remount the L.A. production. That was never an option because the theatre's business model is broken (read my blog, and Mike Daisey's article in The Stranger).
When it comes time to produce my next play, A Trick or Treat, the goal won't be great reviews - I'll never get better reviews than the reviews I got for Texarkana - and New York is worthwhile only as a means. The goal is to pay off my house. Trick or Treat is being developed as a property that will gladly sell its soul to the highest bidder.
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