Late: A Cowboy Song

Piven Theatre

Chicago

(847) 866-8049

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This raw, powerful play from 2003 helped establish Sarah Ruhl as “one of America’s most important contemporary playwrights,” said Chris Jones in the Chicago Tribune. Mary, a conflicted young suburban wife, feels torn between her feelings for her husband, Crick, and a female friend, Red, who works on a nearby ranch. Mary becomes fascinated by Red’s cowgirl persona and free spirit, and the feeling grows into a sexual fixation. As the protagonist’s uncertainties about life with her husband and her own sexuality become increasingly pronounced, Ruhl’s play blossoms into a moving meditation on the subject of “personal fragility.” As Mary, longtime Ruhl collaborator Polly Noonan “is at her very best,” conveying the character’s indecisiveness with careful nuance.

Ruhl’s play sets up some “sharp questions about how a person can hang on to her central core after matrimony and parenthood,” said Kerry Reid in the Chicago Reader. And for all the “Sapphic overtones” to the relationship between Mary and Red, Late is more than just a female version of Brokeback Mountain. Mary’s relationship with Red ultimately represents a sort of lament for paths not taken: She sees Red “as an avatar for the freewheeling life she’d like to sample.” Unfortunately, the relationship between Mary and her husband isn’t as strongly drawn, which makes Late feel a bit lopsided and even “cartoonish at points.” Still, Ruhl’s growing legions of fans should delight in the chance to revisit an early work that foreshadowed “better things to come.”