My overall impression
An excellent cast, well chosen, performing this alternatively hilarious and deceptively morbid piece, executes with precision their clever and well-crafted dialogue, surrounded and supported by elegant lighting, sound, and set design.
I encourage you to see it, particularly if you have darkly humorous sensibilities, or if excellent performances can trump narrative troubles for your money’s-worth.
Not being particularly attuned to the styles of modern theatre, I’ll readily admit that I may have missed something here.
I enjoy and often appreciate experimental theater. I love a good mystery. I like a fish-out-of-water story. I love a good suspense thriller. I enjoy the occasional bromance. I like seeing people pushed to the brink. I like twists, strewn throughout, or at the end of a story that’s been deceiving me deliberately until all is revealed. I even love it when one or more of these things are blended.
But, over and above these stylistic and narrative elements, all of which are present in Rodeo Town (and then some), is when there is a sense of inevitability to whatever element is employed, and a sense of purpose. Experimental forms certainly don’t require this, but it is their outright refusal of it which allows them distinction from it. Ultimately, however, whenever the dots and lines of narrative are employed, I like to see them connect — and not just logically, but emotionally.
I didn’t experience any form of catharsis at the conclusion of Rodeo Town, and I didn’t feel that the lack thereof was deliberate on the part of the storyteller(s). Without spoiling anything, it felt like, at first, I was being shown a world to which there was more than meets the eye. This was certainly true, but the matters that had yet to meet my eye seemed disjointed, unmotivated, and ultimately seemed like they were shocking for the sake of being shocking. The dark journey taken by the outsider/protagonist was certainly vivid, but “the point” of it, if there was meant to be one, was lost on me. And if a lack of a point was the point, I didn’t get that sense, either.
Instead, I was left with a sense of barbarism so disconnected from the preceding narrative that I might have summoned the same sense of my own mortality and animalism by watching a few hours of Shark Week; and, ultimately, I was left with far more questions than I had answers. And these weren’t questions that one might have after, say, David Lynch (of which this performance was reminiscent and that’s meant as a compliment) — not questions of meaning but questions of matter, like, “So how did these people come to be here? Why do they stay? Why is any of this happening?” — and these answers, unless I am missing something crucial, could very well have been addressed even casually to the point of allowing me to brush them aside as unimportant. Instead, they were left to my imagination, and my imagination was actively trying to resolve them on its own rather than relaxing and enjoying the show.
It’s for these reasons that I “liked” the show, instead of “loving” it, but it’s also for these same reasons that I recommend that you go see it and form your own opinion. It’s practically designed to be divisive, and it seems to have succeeded in that, though, for me, not likely for the reasons originally intended.
