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| Jenny O'Hara, Alice Beardley, Beeson Carroll, Cherry Davis. |
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| Beeson Carroll, Dale Robinette. |
This ambitious but disappointing play, by well-known
novelist Robert Coover, excellently staged by noted playwright Jack Gelber in mock-Brechtian style, concerned
the American need for heroes to worship. Set in the mythical Wild West of swinging-door
saloons, dance hall girls, gambling and guzzling cowpokes, and two-gun sheriffs
and bandits, The Kid presents the story of a fumbling lawman (Beeson
Carroll) who manages to outshoot the pure white-garbed, antiheroic robber
called the Kid (Dale Robinette). Having destroyed the idol of the townspeople’s
fantasies, he must be strung up by those he has defended.
Kert Lundell’s brilliant set created the illusion of bottles
and fixtures and furnishings being smashed by flying bullets. Gelber’s
tongue-in-cheek direction had the proper ambience, and the performances were
all on the mark. Coover’s play, however, was too simplistic, its theme
insufficiently meaningful, and “the writing, while fluent and boisterous, . . .
never especially interesting,” opined Clive Barnes. Walter Kerr’s reservations
centered on the lack of dramatic movement, and the dependence on “standstill
filler.”