New West Theater Review

Holt Prairie Saga Continues in “Eventide”

This month the Denver Center for the Performing Arts is presenting the world premier of “Eventide,” playwright Eric Schmiedl’s faithful adaptation of Kent Haruf’s novel, directed by Kent Thompson.  Two years ago Schmiedl turned Haruf’s beloved novel Plainsong into a winning play, and this time he works with darker material, but nevertheless manages to reveal the abundant humor in Haruf’s dialogue.

“Plainsong” told the story of the McPheron brothers, two old bachelor ranchers living on the outskirts of the fictional prairie town of Holt, Colorado, coaxed into sheltering a pregnant teenage girl, Victoria Roubideaux, who had been thrown out by her mother.  They formed a strong, improvised family, and “Eventide” picks up on their lives a few years later, when Victoria’s daughter Katie is two years old, and the McPheron brothers are reluctantly preparing to see them off to Fort Collins, where Victoria will attend college. 

Philip Pleasants and Mike Hartman return to reprise the roles of Harold and Raymond McPheron, respectively, that they played in “Plainsong,” and they once again prove irresistible, two elderly rural gentlemen adept in cattle rearing chores but startled by modern life, unaccustomed to dancing, socializing, and fielding the amorous advances of women.  Their interaction and dialogue, which closely follows that in Haruf’s novel, is hilarious.

New West Book Review

Things That Go Bump in Wyoming: Alyson Hagy’s “Ghosts of Wyoming”

Ghosts of Wyoming
By Alyson Hagy
Graywolf Press, 192 pages, $15

Some places feel more haunted than others.  As Alyson Hagy explores in her new collection of short stories, Ghosts of Wyoming, Wyoming is one of those places where the past seems to overlap with the present, where the rough frontier that she writes of in “The Sin Eaters,” set in 1889, seems to have plenty in common with the oil rig-riddled Wyoming of today, in which Hagy sets the story “Oil & Gas.” Throughout many of the stories, details about the Arapaho and other tribes that settled the area first set a somber tone underneath the main narrative.  Some of these stories touch on issues that are also raised in the work of Annie Proulx, Alexandra Fuller, and other contemporary Wyoming writers, but as with all good fiction, Hagy isn’t trying to convey a message.  She’s just telling some first-rate ghost stories.

Only one of the eight stories, “Superstitions of the Indians,” is a ghost story in the classic sense, but they all have ghosts in them in the form of people who have died or characters haunted by the past.  One of the best stories is the lead-off, “Border,” which conceals its ghost until the very end in an effective twist that works as such endings should, not as a “gotcha!” moment but as a revelation that makes sense of and lends gravity to all the prior events.  In “Border,” a young man hitchhiking his way out of Wyoming, aiming for Denver or beyond, pauses in his journey to steal a collie pup in Meeker, Colo. 

New West Book Review

Two New Travel Books Depict the West from Distinct Vantages

The Most Beautiful Villages and Towns of the Southwest (Thames & Hudson, 208 pages, $40) is a welcome coffee table book to peruse in the middle of winter, with its large photos of sun-struck plazas, warm adobe villas, red rock cliffs, and the bright Victorian buildings of old mountain mining towns.  If you’re from this region, there’s a good chance that you’ve visited a number of the picturesque places featured in the book (Breckenridge, Moab, Taos: check).  Written by Joan Tapper, founding editor of National Geographic Traveler and photographed by Nik Wheeler, who has contributed to National Geographic, the book could serve as a fine souvenir for anyone who has traveled the region. 

Tapper accompanies Wheeler’s vivid photos with lively commentaries that describe three-dozen towns in Arizona, Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico and Utah, giving a brief history of how the towns sprang up, how they endured, and what tourists can expect on a visit.  It’s a breezy read, intended for vacationers who’ve been charmed by these towns, not those concerned with thorny issues facing the West.

New West Book Review

Westerners Speak Up in “Voices of the American West”

Voices of the American West
by Corinne Platt & Meredith Ogilby
Fulcrum Press, 280 pages, $29.95

Photographer Meredith Ogilby and writer Corinne Platt met each other several years ago at the Headwaters Conference, an annual discussion of wide-ranging issues facing the West at Western State College in Gunnison, Colo.  At the time, Platt writes in her introduction to Voices of the American West, she was “considering who the people with enough passion and vision to make a difference in today’s West are.” They decided to embark on a project of interviewing and photographing people “shaped by the geography of the West.”

Platt asked each person they met with a series of questions, including: “How has the West defined you?  Where do you think the West is heading, and what is your role?  Are you hopeful about the future of the West?” They spent four years traveling and meeting with businesspeople, politicians, ranchers, environmental activists, writers, and other Westerners, and the result is this insightful collection of personal stories and black-and-white photographs.

New West Book Review

A White Girl Embraces Mexican Culture in “Gringa”

Gringa: A Contradictory Girlhood
by Melissa Hart
Seal Press, 276 pages, $16.95

Eugene-based writer and University of Oregon journalism teacher Melissa Hart‘s new memoir investigates a childhood complicated enough to merit repeated examination: Gringa is her second childhood memoir, after 2005’s The Assault of Laughter.  Both address the defining incident of her young life: when Hart was in third grade, her mother Maggie recognized she was a lesbian, fell in love with her son’s school bus driver, and took her three kids from their father and their “upper-class gated community” in Southern California, moving them to Oxnard, a predominantly Mexican-American community.  “You can’t grow up parented by two women,” Hart’s father declares, “it’s unnatural.” The judge agrees, granting custody of the children to Hart’s father with two weekends of visitation to her mother a month.

A description of these events sounds rather sensationalistic, but Hart’s strength in Gringa is how natural she makes it all seem.  She recreates the world of 1970’s Southern California for the reader, complete with her mother’s blue VW Bus with “red plaid curtains and eight-track tape player,” blasting Peter, Paul & Mary, a symptom of Maggie’s desire to “return to ‘60s bohemia.” Hart’s descriptions of music, clothing, and food ground the book in the changing pop culture of the decades it spans.

New West Book Review

Nature Laughs Last in T.C. Boyle’s “Wild Child”

Wild Child: And Other Stories
by T.C. Boyle
304 pages, $25.95

Many of the characters in Wild Child, T.C. Boyle’s new collection of short stories, try to maintain an air of refinement: they have a taste for good food and wine, they cultivate precise gardens, they wear expensive clothes, and they seek enlightenment.  But usually these characters’ baser instincts win out, or nature interrupts their careful plans and ruins their leather jackets with mudslides, torrential downpours, or forest fires.  Most of the tales end up illustrating one of Boyle’s recurrent themes: that people are animals, first and foremost.  As clear as Boyle’s themes can be, he’s no moralist, and the stories in this volume are as entertaining and transporting as Boyle’s fiction has always been.

Boyle’s gift for plunging the reader into diverse consciousnesses produces a wide array of believable characters, from a proper Japanese couple who disapprove of their white teenage neighbor’s pyromaniac grilling technique in “Ash Monday,” to the nurturing mother of a Latin American major league pitching sensation in “The Unlucky Mother of Aquiles Maldonado,” to a young, college-educated black woman hired as a dog nanny by a rich couple in “Admiral,” to Victor, the famous feral boy discovered in France around 1800, whose history Boyle recreates in the riveting title novella.

T.C. Boyle will visit the Boulder Book Store on Tuesday, February 9 at 7:30 p.m.  Admission is free for those who purchase either Wild Child or The Woman, or tickets are available for $5.

New West Book Review

How to Get Out of Butte: Sam Shepard’s “Day Out of Days”

Day Out of Days
by Sam Shepard
Alfred A. Knopf, 304 pages, $24.95

Sam Shepard’s new Day Out of Days is a refreshingly odd collection of stories centered around several recurrent characters who drift down the highway, most often fetching up in the American West in places such as Williams and Kingman, Arizona, Taos, New Mexico, Quanah and Seminole, Texas, and Livingston and Butte, Montana.  The narrator is not fond of Butte, offering this vignette: “Roofs keep blowing off the meth-lab shacks sitting directly across the street from neat little Scandinavian bungalows, geranium flower boxes in the windows.  Chemical explosions out of nowhere.  Shirtless rapists, spiderwebs tattooed across their faces, sift through the wreckage…” To underscore his point, Shepard follows that tale with a poem entitled “Get Out of Butte Altogether.” Day Out of Days reads like the scrapbook of a singular mind, filled with wry humor, startling observations about human nature, and plain glorious weirdness. 

Shepard writes each piece with poetic concision and an intimate level of gritty detail that indicates the Pulitzer-Prize winning playwright and Oscar-nominated actor has not isolated himself from the world.  The structure of Day Out of Days is as free as the open road, with poems and dramatic dialogues scattered in among the stories, but a few landmarks recur.  The second story in the book, “Haskell, Arkansas (Highway 70),” begins: “Sunday, midday.  Not many cars.  Man’s out for a stroll.  He comes across a head in a ditch by the side of the road.” The head, nestled in a wicker basket, begins to speak and coerces the man into carrying it to a nearby lake, precipitating the man’s existential crisis.  In several stories later in the book, the head speaks of its experience, and we learn in “These Recent Beheadings” that there has been a rash of these incidents, coming out of nowhere like those meth lab explosions in Butte: “Nobody could predict this.  Not in 1957, anyway, when Chevy came out with that great fin on the Bel Air, and Little Richard was just hitting his stride.”

New West Book Review

Love Hurts: Brian Hart’s “Then Came the Evening”

Then Came The Evening
by Brian Hart
Bloomsbury USA, 272 pages, $25

In the opening scene of his surefooted debut novel, Idaho native Brian Hart introduces the luckless character around which Then Came The Evening revolves, Bandy Dorner, who is still drunk after a night of carousing in Lake Fork, a town in rural Idaho where his family has lived for generations: “Bandy Dorner woke to a fogged windshield, cracked and spattered with mud and grass, the watery shadows of two policemen banging on his car hood with their fists.” It is the early ‘70s and Bandy has returned from the Vietnam War a roughened, inconsiderate man.  Bandy’s cabin has burned down and he believes his common-law wife, Iona, has died in the fire.  His loss makes him want “to kill somebody,” and Bandy disarms one of the cops and shoots him with his own gun, unprovoked.  Meanwhile, we learn that Iona had in fact left with another man, having grown weary of Bandy’s unreliable ways. 

Brian Hart will read from his book in Boise on January 7 at Rediscovered Bookshop (7 p.m.), January 8 at Powell’s Books in Portland, Oreg. (7:30 p.m.), and on January 10 in Bellingham, Wash. at Village Books (4 p.m.).

New West Book Review

Book Details Vivid, Violent Tale of Life on the Arizona-Mexico Border

Crossers
by Philip Caputo
Knopf, 448 pages, $26.95

Philip Caputo’s sprawling new thriller, Crossers, examines three generations of a family that must dole out rough justice in the territory surrounding their Arizona ranch on the Mexico border, “a pretty place where some ugly things happen.” The book opens in 1903, when thirteen-year-old Ben Erskine’s uncle sends him on horseback to buy a bottle of tequila in Mexico.  The errand turns out to be a fateful one, as Erskine ends up choosing to kill a man who attacked him, the first killing of many as his life unfolds.  Erskine eventually has a family and becomes a policeman, although he follows laws only when they suit his ends, and he remains a mystery to his descendants, whose dramas play out in the more contemporary sections of the book.

In 2003, Ben Erskine’s grandson, Blaine, along with his wife and strong-willed mother, are running the ranch Ben established decades earlier, the San Ignacio.  On the other side of the country, Gil Castle, Ben Erskine’s other grandson, is struggling with grief in the aftermath of his wife’s death in the 9-11 terrorist attacks.  Castle is a multimillionaire with a job on Wall Street and a grand house in Connecticut.  Unable to continue his old lifestyle, he quits his job, sells his house, and accepts his family’s offer of sanctuary on the ranch.