Actors Christopher Martin and Stephee Bonifacio in Cowboy Mouth. All photos by Joey D’Amore.  

A Saint with a Cowboy Mouth

The air hung heavy that Wednesday. This wasn’t only because the temperature had hit an eerie 80 degrees in November—it was also the day after the presidential election. Now, I hadn’t been under the illusion that the alternative outcome would’ve been any sort of salvation. There was just this feeling that, in looking to the future, I was staring into darkness, down the barrel of a gun.

I didn’t want to be alone, so I made my way to All Street Gallery in Chinatown for Cruising Paradise: An Evening Honoring Sam Shepard, organized by writer and performer Catherine Spino. Spino began the night by introducing Shepard’s work as a playwright, author, screenwriter, and actor. Across these forms, Shepard portrayed a wide-open American West of broken-down dreamers. He wrote the screenplay Paris, Texas (dir. Wim Wenders, 1984) about a man who emerges from the desert after four years and attempts to reconstruct his shattered past; in Terrence Malick’s Days of Heaven (1978), he plays an ailing but persistent farmer who falls into a sham marriage and faces a Biblical locust swarm during harvest season. Shepard himself was an American archetype of sorts—Joni Mitchell wrote “Coyote” about him.

According to Spino, Shepard’s work asks: “Is everything really rotten at the core? If so, do we choose to leave, to run and escape our fate, or do we choose to stay and die defending it?”

For months, I had been asking myself a similar question. I hadn’t yet found an answer.

The night’s readings were broken up into two sections with an intermission—referred to jovially as the “smoke break,” in keeping with the whole Marlboro Man aura. First up was the family trilogy, consisting of scenes from True West, Curse of the Starving Class, and Buried Child.

Catherine Spino, Annalisa Noel, Zachary Branch, and Bella Carter in Curse of the Starving Class. 

Across these scenes, actors excavated fraught family dynamics through the differing desires of relatives. The bickering and clashes of values felt deeply familiar, and the actors played their characters with zest and volume, rendering even—or especially—the more unhinged ones loveable. I was particularly endeared to the twangy, flaxen-haired brother (Trevor Adam Clarkson) in True West as he narrated a meandering and existential chase scene through the desert for a screenplay, with his more pessimistic brother (Bradley Sheen) telling him all the while that his plot was totally illogical—before they each reveal, of course, that they have always secretly envied the other’s ways. I imagine this turn hits home for anyone who has ever known an American man.

During the smoke break, Spino unveiled an enormous sheet cake from Wegmans that read, “Happy Birthday Sam!” in red cursive frosting, as if the late Shepard was a friend of ours. This cultivated an air of festivity—he would’ve turned 81 the day before. One of the actors (Annalisa Noel, but I knew her then only as the gutsy and furious teenage daughter from Curse of the Starving Class) helped Spino cut and dole out hefty slices. PBR cans, photocopied scripts, and wilting flowers littered the gallery floor. There were reasons to celebrate amid the heavy atmosphere. It may be small in the grand scheme of things, but there’s a lot to be learned in remembering and honoring a life.

Once everyone returned to their seats, the love-story portion of the evening began, consisting of excerpts from the plays Fool for Love and Cowboy Mouth. Of the love stories, Cowboy Mouth drew me in the most due to the actors’ stage presences and chemistry. One (Christopher Martin) was a weathered man with slicked-back silvery hair, a gravelly and booming voice, and a Hawaiian shirt unbuttoned to reveal chest tattoos. The other (Stephee Bonifacio) was a young woman with curly, fire-colored hair and sparkling eyes, wearing a black shirt that said MOTHER on the front and FUCKER on the back. The man played Slim, and the woman played Cavale. Shepard’s script describes Slim as “a cat who looks like a coyote,” and Cavale as “a chick who looks like a crow.” It then notes: “They are both beat to shit.”

In Cowboy Mouth, Cavale has kidnapped Slim with aims of making him a rockstar, and the two end up falling in love. At one point, Cavale tells Slim, “People want a street angel. They want a saint but with a cowboy mouth. Somebody to get off on when they can’t get off on themselves…We’re earthy people and the old saints just don’t make it, and the old God is just too far away. He don’t represent our pain no more.”

The idea of “a saint with a cowboy mouth” reminded me of endless American archetypes I’d glorified or been told to glorify, and it made me think of Shepard himself—some kind of patron saint to us despite our “different sets of circumstance” (shoutout Joni). Him: an artist and American of a potentially bygone kind in love with open space. Us: art-obsessed kids in a compact city, living in aspiration toward his image of vanishing vastness. I wondered why we were drawn to Shepard, and what his art has to teach us.

No performance that night was subtle, the actors being unafraid to raise their voices, storm across the small stage, and even bang their fists on the gallery wall. This style felt warranted by the week, the month, the year we’d had; it felt like catharsis. Being in a tight room with other human beings and hearing them yell frustrations was close enough to voicing my own.

Spino closed out the night with a reading of Patti Smith’s “My Buddy”—the eulogy she published in the New Yorker after Shepard’s death in 2017. Smith describes her friend calling at odd hours “from somewhere on the road, a ghost town in Texas, a rest stop near Pittsburgh, or from Santa Fe,” but mostly from “his place in Kentucky, on a cold, still night, when one could hear the stars breathing.” The two would talk freely—about landscapes, life, literature. Spino teared up while she read Smith’s words aloud to us. In place of the gross numbness that had eaten up my day, I found I wasn’t all that far from tears myself.

The eulogy is of course mournful, but it’s also a touching ode to long-term friendship. It reminds us of the pleasure of reciprocal understanding, that we are not as alone in this world as we may sometimes feel. If our lives are finite, it is our friends who will carry on our stories after we’re gone. “We were friends,” Smith writes, “good or bad, we were just ourselves.”

While we’re left to wonder what Sam Shepard would think of our current political predicament, breathing life into his words offered something close to an answer. I entered All Street feeling sickened by America and its ideas—while I didn’t necessarily leave without that feeling, the evening made me remember the love that I carry for this place too, and the ways that it has shaped me.

This is not to say these plays are inspirational or, in fact, anything short of bleak. The dreams voiced so ardently in them never seem to come to fruition. But I could see all the characters that briefly took the stage existing alongside each other in some shared world. Rather than immersing us in one play in its entirety, the evening offered vignettes into a multitude of lives, unfolding simultaneously across the American landscape. All these people ached with want, and in most cases, they wanted simple things: to win a contest, to travel, to make some money. They were fucked up and mean and angry and they felt known to me—like Grandpa, like Mom, like that one crazy girl from high school. We’re lost together in the wasteland of our own making, wary of trusting each other, even though “each other” may be our only hope for salvation. How would we get out of this mess? Could we ever?

I thought of the closing lines of the True West scene that started the night:

“So they take off after each other straight into an endless black prairie. The sun is just comin’ down and they can feel the night on their backs. What they don't know is that each one of ‘em is afraid, see. Each one separately thinks that he’s the only one that's afraid. And they keep ridin’ like that straight into the night. Not knowing. And the one who’s chasin’ doesn’t know where the other one is taking him. And the one who’s being chased doesn't know where he's going.”

So maybe we’re already doomed. But I felt kinship with the man who dreamed up that scene. I knew someone else had seen what I was seeing, and had done so long before I ever got here. Night fell, and an even more lasting darkness stretched out in every direction, and I knew I wasn’t as alone as I’d thought—if only I’d turn around to face the land I came from.