Two black women kiss at the climax of the Broadway musical “The Color Purple,” and capacity crowds stand and roar with approval. Two cowboys kiss in the film “Brokeback Mountain,” and the theater is as quiet as the Wyoming prairie, as if this single act has unleashed a chill wind blowing all the way back to the dawn of America’s rugged frontier West mythology.
“Part of that has to be the Matthew Shepard thing,” says Pulitzer-winning author Marsha Norman, referring to the 1998 slaying of a young gay man on the outskirts of Laramie.
“And part has to be a recognition that the politics of the West are anything but forgiving. All of that ‘live and let live’ is something they do somewhere else, but not here. The way all those states vote makes it clear: The West is still very much about retribution and punishment. It’s vengeful, protective and territorial.”
But while “The Color Purple” sold 8 million tickets in its first two months in New York, “Brokeback Mountain” is at least being considered, if not wholly embraced, by a wider mainstream audience, grossing $23 million in its first month.
“It may be that through the arts, we are finally seeing a way of at least classifying both of these relationships as real love,” said Norman, who penned the “Color Purple” stage adaptation, as well as “The Holdup,” a comedy that opened Friday at the Victorian Theatre. It is one of the few Westerns written by a woman.
“That’s a start, because that would be the first step toward a kind of acceptance,” added the 58-year-old mother of two who won her Pulitzer for “‘Night, Mother.” “If you say these relationships are love, then OK, because everyone likes love stories.
“‘Purple’ audiences are so glad this woman has found somebody to love her that it doesn’t matter who it is with. And in ‘Brokeback Mountain,’ you just know the only way for these poor guys to get through this really hard life they’re living is to feel love. And so you want that for them.”
Norman is an atypical frontier woman, having lived all her adult life on the East Coast. She was raised in Louisville, Ky., where “my mother was a religious fanatic who didn’t allow any television,” she said. It was isolating and claustrophobic, but she did have a grandfather, a New Mexico rancher who told Norman stories as if every bedtime were held around a crackling campfire.
It was the kind of childhood that produces a writer.
Norman, penned “The Holdup,” which she describes as an “insanely silly play” in 1983 but never before performed in Denver, as “a piece of love from me to my grandfather. I really feel he’s why I have the life I have.”
“The Holdup” is set in 1914 on New Mexico’s plains. Two brothers, one a thoughtful innocent named Archie and the other an abusive bully named Henry, are based on real relatives.
“My grandfather was the goody-goody brother among all these bad-(expletive) ranchers,” Norman said. “They were just monsters, but he ran away from trouble to be able to tell the story about it later. He got beat up, but he was always going to be able to tell how the fight went.”
By basing “The Holdup” on her grandfather, Norman fashioned an utterly original Western protagonist with no real regard for the accepted crudity of the Old West. “He doesn’t like the rough stuff and the killing,” Norman said. “He’s a little bit of a stick in the mud, which my grandfather definitely was.”
Because so few women pen Westerns, Norman was mistakenly hailed by scholars for feminizing the frontier by marrying Old West savagery with Eastern ideas of civilization. Norman chuckles because she was simply being true to her emotional memories of one real cowboy. Hers is rather a coming-of-age story of this one man, and of the West itself.
“As a dramatist, he’s my hinge between this Western past and a modern future,” said Norman, who isn’t sure why the frontier West doesn’t interest more female writers. “I just know it interests me,” she said.
“I love the West. I feel like that’s my real home. There is just nothing more interesting to me than the size of the sky compared to the size of the people. And in that environment, the people were way up against it. Especially the women.
“The primary role of the woman in the West was just to watch. For a man, life was just one gigantic war-slash-rodeo. But in the early days, when a man would first come into a piece of property, the women basically lived in caves while the men were out doing the shooting and roping and fighting.”
Norman’s grandmother was one of seven daughters of a Kentucky tobacco farmer who was dispatched to New Mexico to find out if tobacco could be grown easily in the West. When it was time to return to the more accommodating Kentucky soil, she was in love with the man who would become Norman’s storytelling grandfather.
Norman returned to Clovis every summer to hear his stories. Her favorite was a tale about a coyote who chased him into town and onto the pages of “The Holdup.”
“That’s really the central story of our childhood,” said Norman, whose brother, retired Air Force Col. Mark Williams, lives in Pueblo.
“At the end of his life there finally came this sappy moment when I realized he wasn’t coming out of the hospital this time. I ran in there in tears, and I had the gall to say to him, ‘Please tell me that story about the coyote one more time,’ which he did. You know how sometimes you just act like an idiot around dying people? It was selfish. But I needed to hear it again.”
“The Holdup” audiences know the West of 1914 has irrevocably changed when the hero looks up into the sky and sees an airplane. But some of its prairie mysteries remain. “In many ways, the West is still ‘unmelded America,”‘ Norman said.
“A lot of the literature of the West calls into question the commandments. Is it always wrong to kill? Well, no, not always. It remains a morally curious world, and I will always find it infinitely interesting.”
Theater critic John Moore can be reached at 303-820-1056 or jmoore@denverpost.com.
