Jack McGee
There’s books on books on books to be written and read on the queering of the cowboy. Brokeback Mountain came out 20 years ago. It’s been seven years since Mitski released Be the Cowboy. We can only guess that a hundred thousand Chappell-esque glittery cowboy hats have been purchased in the past year. You can do your own pins and string conspiracy board charting the history, from John Wayne to Lady Gaga’s John Wayne, from old town roads to Old Town Road. On my imaginary cork board, the string all trails off in one direction. It threads down through Sam Shepard, cuts past David Lynch, and winds up in the melancholy little corner that is Jim’s No Cowboy.
Here’s the pitch. The west, somewhere out of time. Tapere Iti’s stage has been transformed into a small town drag bar. Jim and the Dorothy's, a band of three queer men, all notably not played by men, are going to perform their last show after an extended stay. This is gig theatre. Jim (Sophie Maree), is a singer and guitarist. He’s supported by Buck Friday (Kelsi Stroud) on bass, and Big Drummin’ (Sibel Atalay) on the obvious. The story is told through, and in between, songs. Whatever he’s been running from has caught up with him.
Kids Playing Dress Up.
Sophie Maree does not pass for a cowboy. This is probably why the show works. The play would be made worse, not better, if it had Jake Gyllenhaal or Pedro Pascal in the title role. Jim speaks in an accent somewhere between Old West and Westport. The Dorothys' moustaches are fake. There’s an accepted performativity to this. The cowboy is a costume that both it’s characters and performers can step into.
The semiotics of the cowboy speak for themselves: rugged masculinity, self-reliance and isolation, a world wide open waiting to be drifted through. They’re complicated by our immediate understanding that it’s all artifice. Why would someone choose to present themselves this way? We’re let in on the joke the second Jim steps on stage, hell, the second we see the poster. Jim’s No Cowboy mostly plays it straight. There’s the occasional more winking flourish that doesn’t land for me - the Dorothys’ performances are often dialled a little too high - but crucially, for the most part, Jim doesn’t know they’re not pulling off the fit.
Here’s the thing I really love. This isn’t taking place in the most rooting, tooting, gnarly, joint in the west - it’s happening in a drag bar. Jim is out, here. The semiotics of the cowboy are not being used to mask queerness, they’re being wielded as queer. Rugged masculinity, is super gay. Cowboys are gay now. Maybe they always have been? This leaves Maree open to tell a much more complicated story about why someone would want to put on the hat.
I’m going to talk in full spoilers. In case it’s not obvious, I think you should see this show, and if spoilers are something you care about, I would stop reading here.
There’s a wonderfully assured, assonant, simplistic quality to the construction of Jim’s No Cowboy. It tells one story, really well, and then it ends. Slowly, Jim reveals the specifics of the relationship he’s been running from. He used to be married - to a woman. He was closeted, and seemingly, so was she, and this allowed the relationship to function, until he broke it. He resented her for not being able to perform femininity, for not wanting to wear the beautiful dresses he bought her. The dresses he was craving to wear. This pain, shifts from him, to her. “She held onto it so easy.” When she gets sick, he leaves. She gets sicker. He finds himself in a drag bar.
Is Jim trans? Maybe! Probably! The image of a woman, playing a man, playing a cowboy, wearing a dress, lets you run in a lot of different directions. Gender here is complicated. In some ways he seems happy, performing the cowboy. His tragedy, the heartbreak and pain he’s left behind him, become his myth. He’s been given the means with which to run, songs to sing that make his tragedy palatable. He can bury things in there, until eventually, they bubble up. Then, once they’re out on the surface, the cowboy gives him and Maree the tools to tell the darker parts of this story. The tropes, the language, it sculpts the events of his life into this aching, moody, low-lit, shape that we, and he, can make some sort of sense of.
There’s more than two versions of Jim. The two we get to conceptualise - him in the closet, performing a marriage, and him on stage, performing Roy Orbison - are both nuanced. He and his wife had something, not sexual, not necessarily romantic, but a complicated kind of love. We never get to see a happy, uplifting, “true self” version of Jim, though we do, joyfully, get to see him put on a dress. While he ultimately confronts the tragedy he’s running from, the person we’re rooting for him to find, to become, is still blurred. Which is heartbreaking and brilliant. It’s assured; the kind of ending I yearn for in theatre and so rarely find. For a show that feels like kids playing dress up, it leaves you in a place that is distinctly mature.
Good Songs.
The show starts off with Jim and the Dorothy’s performing covers. Apache, by the Shadows, then, Oh, Pretty Woman, by Roy Orbison. Next, we move into original songs. The first and most important thing to note about the show’s music, is that it’s being performed by musicians. As far as I can tell from her online footprint, Sophie Maree is a musician first, and a theatre maker second. As a theatre maker who can’t sing, I feel I can confidently say that it’s about 100 times easier to make a good theatre show, than it is to write and perform a good song.
The show would fall apart if the music wasn’t, A. enjoyable to listen to, and B. able to carry complex emotions. In an odd move for Fringe, this is a show that feels like it’s been cooking for a long, long, time. The songs are all buried with lyrical nuances that tell us about the character. Even the covers are revealing. I’ll never listen to the lyrics of Pretty Woman the same way again.
With her original songs, Maree has room to play. There’s humour there. She toys with sexuality and the cowboy persona, pick-up trucks and penis pistols, until, gradually, the songs become sad. Really sad. But not broad, non-specific, theatre sad. Instead, it’s an emotionally articulate, perceptive, sadness that you can pull apart as it washes over you. The song Shame is the best example of this. It’s about what you think it’s about.
As the music goes on, it loses some of its country feel, which, harking back to the kids-playing-dress-up of it all, doesn’t bother me. Anything that leaks through the artifice has an inherent emotionality to it. It’s also all of such a high quality, that I’m pre-disposed to connect with it. Musically, and you can tell I’m not a music critic, these are good songs! Jim’s No Cowboy feels like a four leaf clover, a gig theatre show where neither the gig nor the theatre feel lesser or perfunctory.
Brooklyn, Wellington.
Back to my cork board, Jim’s No Cowboy wears its influences on its sleeve. The second half of the show is essentially the monologue from Paris, Texas performed with songs. In Dreams, more Roy Orbison, is in the pre-show playlist, hinting at Blue Velvet. Of course, as they say, it’s not about where you take it from, it’s where you take it to.
Jim No Cowboy is specific, and somehow, despite all the iconography it’s juggling, original. It’s too complex to ever feel derivative. Even on opening night, where the edges are rough, and Maree misses a mark or two, it feels more polished, more crafted and developed, than the majority of art I’ve seen in Wellington. The highest praise I can give it, is that it’s short, entertaining, rich, and treats the audience like they’re adults.
I’m drawn again to the un-concealable kiwi lilt in Maree’s southern accent. Other than the ground Jim’s standing on, it’s the only thing that ties it to Aotearoa, and yet it convinces me that the show is of here. We are leaking in. It is a direct continuation of the conversations we’re having now. It exists in the same frame as girls wearing promotional cowboy hats down the road at Dakota. Simultaneously, it’s a million miles away. Jim’s No Cowboy is stumbling into a black box. It’s bringing yourself with you as you’re transported out of time and out of place.
★★★★⯪- 4.5/5 Stars