Review: The Cowboy from Corona by The Hourglass Players
by Michael Meigs
For her simple tale of a New Mexico incident Cindy Vining uses the metaphor of Purgatory as described by Dante in the Divine Comedy (ca. 1320). The framework is Christianity lite, without the complications of theology.
We're greeted with song by a not-quite-yet-heavenly choir, all dressed in white. The recently deceased Captola, known as Cappie, is happy to arrive to the afterlife from rural New Mexico. She's looking forward to the climb up the mountain toward the earthly paradise at the top.
Briana McKeague as Cappie is excited, talkative, and optimistic. She's ready for the climb, even though she's carrying a lot with her -- visible in the form of her hiker's backpack, intangible and unacknowledged as events in her past.
Dante had his Virgil to guide him along the way, and Cappie has her Vee. The heart of this piece is the relation between the two.
Playwright Vining looks to craft a whimsical tale with a sting toward the end. Vee is a failed angel, a sort of Clarence Oddbody ASC who never made the grade and is stuck spending eternity as an escort for those new arrivals who've got some lessons ahead of them. Sharp-spoken, disabused and weary of it all, Vee hauls a flask around with her. If this piece had been written sixty years ago -- entirely imaginable, given the style and plot artifice -- Lana Dieterich as Vee might have been chain-smoking throughout the play. Heaven is "over-rated," she growls, pushing herself along on her walker. She winces at Cappie's excitement and ambition. The interplay between these two is the central attraction of this story.
Vining brings on choir members for vignettes that at first appear unrelated to Cappie's travail -- in some cases that's only because we failed to read the program in advance. Dores (Kathryn Culliton) speaks about searching for her disappeared brother. Hester (Margaret Hoard) eventually turns out to be Cappie's mother. Tom Chamberlain and Craig Kanne are assigned a checkerboard and some episodic nonsensical disputation, explained in the cast listing as debate about Machiavallianism.
The travelers' circles around the stage are intended to correspond to the terraced stages Dante established for the mountain of Purgatory (diagrammed and meticulously labeled on the reverse of the program leaflet). The correlation isn't directly evident to us, but we do see Cappie recalling more and more of an incident in her youth involving a dance, a handsome stranger from Corona and violence that erupted.
It looks as if Cappie has her venal sins lifted via this journey, for she gradually remembers with vivid detail everything about the incident and its consequences, and she recognizes her mom. The cowboy's sister seems to have achieved her white garb thanks to her persistent but unfruitful search for her disappeared brother. The two disputatious gentlemen in white overalls and t-shirts remain enigmas and count principally as scenery.
Surely they couldn't be the cowboy and Cappie's angry beau, could they?
The Cowboy from Corona
by Cindy Vining
Hourglass Productions
