Chuck Wagon Stew

By Melvin Maddocks

CORRAL

Compiled and Directed by ALLAN ALBERT

The American cowboy survives mostly as a caricature--a wandering figment of the national imagination, lost somewhere between a scene from Blazing Saddles and the last chorus of Home on the Range. He deserves better, and he gets it in Corral, a sort of cowboy-minstrel show playing at the Proposition Workshop in Cambridge, Mass. It is Director Allan Albert's engaging notion to let the cowboy portray himself through his own songs and tall tales.

The production is as stripped-to-essentials as the inventory of a frontier general store. Two men of swaggering good voice (Jack Blessing and Peter Johnson) stand in for their breed, costumed in stetsons, chaps and--you would swear--trail dust. Two women (Linda Harvey and Olga Holub) mime and sing the parts of nagging wives and barroom girls. Two musicians (Claudio Buchwald and John Guth) splendidly score the changing moods on guitar, banjo, fiddle and mandolin. One main prop, a sawhorse, does duty as every thing from a bucking bronco to a saloon table.

Laredo Funeral. Corral is often funny. Joke recipes seem to abound for every need of frontier life, including strong coffee. (Pitch in a horseshoe. If it sinks, the brew's still too weak.) A kind of lip-smacking rhetoric flourishes, pronouncing tall cowboys "Shorty" and nicknaming the poor fellow with a limp "Step-and-a-Half."

But the laughs can turn as maudlin as a Laredo funeral ("I spied a poor cowboy wrapped up in white linen") or as violent as a noonday hanging ("My name is Sam Hall, and I hate you one and all . . . God damn your eyes"). The final impression is of a folk driven to its lore by hardship, monotony, and drudgery--by a fairly hellish life in a fairly hellish country where "the sandburs prevail and so do the ants,/ And those who sit down need half-soles on their pants."

Corral is not a definitive portrait of the cowboy. Like a good chuckwagon stew, the evening is a matter of hearty ingredients casually thrown together. But in its open, unabashed pleasure over tuneful music, savory language, and bigger-than-life characters, Corral celebrates the elements that make a cowboy--and theater.

--Melvin Maddocks

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