An ongoing debate in theater circles is whether an advance interview with a director or playwright predisposes a critic to either enjoy or understand the final creation more than other audience members.
It’s an issue. Unless you live in New York, chances are your daily theater critic does double duty, often offering up previews of noteworthy productions before switching on his critic’s hat. Surely, some readers contend, doing objective scout work must affect the subjective analysis to follow.
It does, but it can work both ways. Yes, a playwright might plant a conceit into the head of a scribe, who might then see some nuance another audience member misses. Likewise, a playwright can set the bar so high, a befuddled critic might then be harder on a play than a less-informed theatergoer.
I bring this up as it relates to “The Holdup,” an anachronistic 1983 Western penned by Pulitzer winner Marsha Norman (“‘Night Mother, “The Color Purple”). When you get the chance to speak to a Pulitzer winner, you best rope it in.
Norman was elucidating on issues such as the feminization of the Western genre. But going into The Victorian’s Theatre’s first-ever staging of this play in Colorado, I admit one thing she said kept rolling through my empty head like a tumbleweed across the New Mexico prairie. “The Holdup,” she said, “is an insanely silly play.”
We have a disconnect. Either director Terry Dodd didn’t get the insane or the silly part of that equation, or it has been 22 years since Norman has seen her own play. Because what I saw was neither insane nor silly. It was better: It was melancholy and nostalgic and surprisingly thoughtful. If there was a drawback, it’s that this little play with the big artistic vision is too enigmatically drawn and moves at too languid a pace.
With “Godot”-like symmetry and metaphor, “The Holdup” covers one night in 1914 on the high plains of eastern New Mexico, where everyone, it seems, has a coyote on their tail. Two teen brothers – macho hothead Henry (Jude Moran), and meek, virginal dreamer Archie (Matt Zambrano) – spend the night waiting: for the wheat-thrashing crew to return from whoring and gambling, for the coming industrial explosion, for the start of the first world war. For daylight.
As was the case in the ambiguous Beckett classic that informs this play, who they expect is not who comes to call. They are visited by “The Outlaw” (Dan Mundell), a menacing, grizzled gunfighter who has shot his injured old horse, and Lily (Stephanie Jones), a former dance-hall girl who now owns the biggest hotel in town and arrives out of nowhere in her shiny new Buick.
After inevitable confrontations between old and new worlds, the coming dawn affords those left standing a chance to start anew – if they can change with the times. For the sensitive Archie, the final hours of darkness are his own adolescent rite of passage, replete with difficult moral choices that will turn frontier notions of bravery, civilization and manhood upside down.
At the same time, the Outlaw deteriorates from a menace into a meek, dying remnant of an Old West where horses are being replaced by cars and birds are making room for airplanes. His day appears to be over.
Dodd elicits an effective performance from Moran and a remarkable one from the rock-solid Jones, but this story must be carried on the shoulders of Zambrano and Mundell. Zambrano is a promising young actor and plays a charming hero. But he looks far older than Archie’s 17 years and overcompensates with an affected, aw-shucks delivery that undermines his believability.
But as the Outlaw, the surprising Mundell is proof-positive you are never too old to improve – markedly.
In assuming this larger-than-life role, Mundell remains contained and on point while completing a tragic fall of Greek proportions. Unlike those doomed forebears, this outlaw has an awfully good woman standing by to break his fall and drive him off into the sunset – if he’s willing to leave his dead horse and old ways behind.
Theater critic John Moore can be reached at 303-820-1056 or jmoore@denverpost.com.
** 1/2 | “The Holdup”
DRAMA|Victorian Theatre|Written by Marsha Norman|Directed by Terry Dodd|Starring Matt Zambrano, Dan Mundell, Stephanie Jones and June Moran|At 4201 Hooker St.|THROUGH FEB. 18|7:30 p.m. Fridays-Saturdays, 6 p.m. Sundays|2 hours, 10 minutes|$18-$20|303-433-4343
