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David Cale in Blue Cowboy, at the Bushwick Starr. Photo: Maria Baranova
“There’s a short story by the writer Annie Proulx called ‘Brokeback Mountain,’” the erudite, socially awkward New York writer tells the cowboy he has stumbled into romancing. “I think you should read that.” “Saw the movie,” the cowboy responds. “Was good. Good enough that I don’t think I nee…
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David Cale in Blue Cowboy, at the Bushwick Starr. Photo: Maria Baranova
“There’s a short story by the writer Annie Proulx called ‘Brokeback Mountain,’” the erudite, socially awkward New York writer tells the cowboy he has stumbled into romancing. “I think you should read that.” “Saw the movie,” the cowboy responds. “Was good. Good enough that I don’t think I need to read the story.” The exchange, which David Cale acts out midway through his solo performance Blue Cowboy, triggers a cascade of laughs, as well as a satisfied exhale—from those anticipating the title from the first mention of Proulx, to those both amused and relieved that the cowboy isn’t nearly as oblivious as the writer imagines. Cale has, by that point, laid out the tropes of a typical coastal interloper’s gay fantasia of the Mountain West. But there are more mysterious forces at work here, and stranger depths to the characters involved. As Cale acknowledges what you think is going on, Blue Cowboy slowly and then suddenly subverts your expectations. It’s an impressive display of storytelling dexterity, the monologuing equivalent of a rodeo rope trick: Watch him tie what looks like any old knot, and then pull on it to unloop the story entirely.
In the cozy space of the Bushwick Starr, Cale sits in a black T-shirt and pants on a stool at a microphone in front of a painted backdrop of a mountain vale by Colleen Murray. It’s a set-up, directed by Les Waters, that flirts with the nostalgic kitsch of hotel decor you might find at a national park—behind Cale, there is also a rawhide lamp and a large painted standee of a bull elk—but which can, through the often moon-like glow of Mextly Couzin’s lighting, take on shades of the vast and serene or the ominous. You settle into scenery in the way that Cale settles into his story. Narrating in the first person, he plays a writer who takes up a job working for an aspiring film producer who invites him to stay in his house in Sun Valley, Idaho, and draft a film script. The movie idea is an obvious bust, but the job gives Cale’s character an excuse to wander around the area observing the foreign-to-him customs. He becomes fascinated by a “trailing of the sheep” event, makes extended eye contact with a handsome younger ranch hand, Will, who’s throwing candy to passersby, and then fortuitously runs into him again. They talk, flirting without acknowledging it, and soon they’re on not-quite dates—Will, in the closet around his co-workers, always introduces the writer as his employer—and then experimenting in bed. Cale’s descriptions of sex are, like the rest of his monologue, frank, finely observed, and charged with both horniness (not since Andrew Scott romancing himself in Vanya has a solo performer vividly conjured the presence of two bodies) and an eye for telling foibles. In the midst of the building romance, he devotes a mini set piece to the act of biking to a small-town pharmacy to discreetly purchase lube.
Cale developed Blue Cowboy at a residency in Idaho—like his narrator, abandoning another script idea after arriving—and the piece is suffused with lived-in detail that makes you, as an audience member, relax into Cale’s assured descriptions of a place where agricultural labor brushes shoulders with the private-jet class. At the pharmacy, he hears, yet again, from a local who gushes about how lovely their neighbor Carole King is. Blue Cowboy’s pairing of Cale’s narrator and Will the cowboy—so handsome, so soulful, so repressed as to be nearly fantastical—heightens your awareness of the class and political divides at play. Here, a lesser play might lean heavily on a metaphorical lesson, with two men of different worlds reconciled through love, or devolve into confrontation and lurid melodrama. Cale doesn’t unpick Blue Cowboy’s innate tension—the possibility of violence lingers throughout like a distant thunderhead on the plains—but he instead pivots and extends the play’s scope. A series of revelations, parceled out in Blue Cowboy’s last third, rescramble what Cale’s narrator knows of Will, and how we in the audience expect the story to unfold.
I won’t spoil the pleasure of experiencing Cale’s gentle but assured turns of the storytelling wheel, but I will say that the piece succeeds in part by destabilizing what you know of Will and, just as much, of the narrator. Cale has made a career writing and performing these kinds of monologues, but they were about invented events, if often flecked with autobiography, until 2019’s musical memoir We’re Only Alive for a Short Amount of Time, which dealt directly with his violent father. In Blue Cowboy, Cale’s not playing himself—the narrator is referred to as “Andrew” in his script and goes unnamed in dialogue—but his presence invites you to imagine an overlap. Being the naive newbie in Idaho does suit Cale, with his British lilt and fey enthusiasm for the manliness of the West. *Could this all maybe have happened? *Probably not, but Cale and Waters are happy to lure you into a space where, in the mountain air, it seems possible. And that’s also a place where those familiar postures—the brooding cowboy, the angsty writer—start to dissolve. Each is a kind of performance, *Blue Cowboy *implies, that can be untangled and revealed as a fiction but also contains something beautiful in its sustained gesture. Who wouldn’t be enraptured by the thought of an evening of cowboy poetry, to which Will invites Andrew for one of their dates? “What’s cowboy poetry?” the writer asks the cowboy. He responds with a description that’s precise and expansive enough to describe this play—it’s “exactly what it sounds like.”
In Did You Eat? (밥 먹었니?), now at the Public via Ma-Yi Theater, the writer and performer Zoë Kim is also going about the work of defamiliarization, though she’s dealing more directly with events in her own life. Kim, as directed by Chris Yejin, enters the stage with the chipper persona of someone about to deliver a TED Talk or perhaps make her case for tenure as a professor of psychology. “I’m so happy to see you!” she tells her audience, before shifting into a lesson about love languages that’s also a lesson in emotional and literal translation. Instead of saying that she loves you, Kim explains, maybe your mother—umma, as Kim refers to her in Korean—will simply ask “did you eat?” or “밥 먹었니?” Other variations of the same question, she adds, carry slightly altered meanings, and as Kim explains the differences, translations of each are projected behind her.
Zoë Kim in Did You Eat? (밥 먹었니?), at the Public. Photo: Emma Zordan
This introduction frames *Did You Eat? *as a kind of tutorial in assimilation by way of memoir, and it starts out stiffly presentational. Kim picks up a small white glowing orb—it looks a lot like something you’d buy at the MoMA Design Store down the street from the Public—and starts to narrate her own biography to it. Born in the 1980s in Korea to parents who are disappointed not to have a son, she spent her childhood contorting herself to please them. She never succeeded, and soon she was sent off to boarding school in America, where Kim found herself isolated and lonely. She asks her audience if they know the feeling of singing along to a song everyone around them also knows, and then leads them in a round of “Take Me Out to the Ball Game,” joking that it’s royalty-free, before cutting the music. “You won’t be included,” she tells her orb, “and you won’t be able to participate.” Much of Did You Eat? follows that familiar immigrant-narrative contour, and the dramatic impact of her journey is diminished by how quickly she, as a playwright, tends to pull back from it to broad concepts—at one point she references fetishization and the model-minority myth in quick succession as if prepping us for a quiz. Kim is always translating, both literal phrases and her emotional state, in a way that keeps the play nonspecific, nervous about leaving behind any viewer. Mystery can be its own confidence, and can draw an audience in.
Soon, though, the play takes a turn into more unsettling territory, and it becomes compelling. Kim’s father follows her to boarding school. Emotional and physical abuse follows, and Kim’s sunniness as a performer is reframed as defiance against trauma. So are her gestures: Kim, following choreography by Iris McCloughan, repeats movements for various characters and concepts. She salutes when conjuring the manliness her father is disappointed not to find in her, bows when playing her kindly halmeoni, and gets on her knees and rays when trying to wring sympathy out of her immovable and cruelly distant parents. The choreography makes *Did You Eat? *resemble a ritual, as if following these specific movements enables Kim to don the armor she needs to revisit difficult memories. Where Kim’s script may get vague and inspirational—near the end, she returns to a didactic and triumphant mode, with lessons about self-love and her admittedly adorable dog—her body speaks with its own language. In those repeated movements, there’s muscle memory, the accumulation of pain endured and processed kinetically.
Blue Cowboy is at the Bushwick Starr through November 22. Did You Eat (밥 먹었니?) is at the Public Theater through November 16.
Stories You Think You Know: Blue Cowboy and Did You Eat?
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