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| James Kiernan, Robyn Goodman, Bradford Dourif, Elizabeth Sturges, Joe Jamrog, Kristen Van Buren, Addison Powell, Kevin Conway (front). (Photos: R.E. Wasserman.) |
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| Kevin Conway, Kristen Van Buren. |
Following a
successful month’s run at the Circle Rep, Mark Medoff’s melodrama moved elsewhere
for a commercial production where, with the same cast, it ran for the better
part of a year. Reminiscent of Robert E. Sherwood’s Depression-era The Petrified Forest, the play is set in
a New Mexico diner on a Sunday morning where the customers and employees are
interrupted by a violent, longhaired, young dope runner and college dropout
named Teddy (Kevin Conway). With his girlfriend Cheryl (Kristen Van Buren) has to remain there until his car, packed with drugs, is repaired at the
adjoining service station.
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| Bradford Dourif, Kevin Conway. |
Before long, this
hippie hoodlum is bullying and plaguing everyone (both physically and with his dark sense of humor), stripping them of their illusions, often at the point of
his handgun. The others include Stephen (Bradford [Brad] Dourif), a skinny, tattooed
employee nicknamed “Red Ryder,” who swaggers about but is really a coward; a
limping, old, garage owner, Lyle (Addison Powell); a married couple of New
Yorkers, Clarice (Robyn Goodman) and Richard (James Kiernan); and Angel
(Elizabeth Sturges), the fat countergirl who pines for Stephen.
The theme concerns
the attempts of Teddy to strip bare the deceptive façades of America’s middle-class,
symbolizing what Harold Clurman called “the disenchanted young who spit out their
education and take their extravagant adventures to the point of crime.” Despite
quibbles over Medoff’s purposes, the critics were in thrall to the intense,
beautifully acted and designed drama. “[Y]our attention is held throughout,”
observed John Simon, who was gripped by the truthfulness of the characters.
Clive Barnes thought it “a fascinating and commanding play. . . . Mr. Medoff
writes superbly. . . . [The play] suggests a chilling picture of a lonely, lost
America. . . . [I]t has all the genuine suspense of the thrillers it is in
effect echoing.”
Walter Kerr was less
enthused because to him the work was “an uneasy and often irritating blur of
the quasi-symbolic and the unfinished case history.” He did not believe the
character of Teddy and found the dramatist guilty of “creating arbitrary suspense.”
Kenneth Frankel’s
tight, atmospheric staging was abetted by an ensemble of terrific performances,
Kevin Conway, for example, giving “the role of Teddy all the brash, steely,
disconcerting shrewdness it demands,” as Edith Oliver described it. (At one point in the run, playwright Medoff himself briefly replaced Conway.)
When You Comin’ Back, Red Ryder? won an OBIE for Distinguished Play,
Medoff was recognized by the Drama Desk Award for Outstanding New Playwright,
Conway and Sturges earned their own OBIEs for Distinguished Performance, while
also snaring Drama Desk Awards for Outstanding Performance.
A film version,
directed by Milton Katselas, appeared in 1979.
Do you enjoy Theatre’s Leiter Side? As you may know,
since New York’s theatres were forced into hibernation by Covid-19, this blog
has provided daily posts on the hundreds of shows that opened in the city, Off
and on Broadway, between 1970 and 1975. These have been drawn from an
unpublished manuscript that would have been part of my multivolume Encyclopedia of
the New York Stage series,
which covers every show, of every type, from 1920 through 1950. Unfortunately,
the publisher, Greenwood Press, decided it was too expensive to continue the
project beyond 1950.
Before I began offering these 1970-1975 entries, however, Theatre’s
Leiter Side posted over 1,600 of my actual reviews for shows from 2012
through 2020. The first two years of that experience were published in separate
volumes for 2012-2013 and 2013-2014 (the latter split into two volumes). The
2012-2013 edition also includes a memoir in which I describe how, when I was 72,
I used the opportunity of suddenly being granted free access to every New York
show to begin writing reviews of everything I saw. Interested readers can find
these collections on Amazon.com by
clicking here.
Next up: Where Do We Go from Here?
