By Joe Stead www.steadstylechicago.com

Where are all the good cowboy stories these days?  Not I am afraid at the Piven Theatre, where Sara Ruhl's "Late: A Cowboy Song" is making its Chicago Premiere.  It's an extremely tepid and empty three character play that takes hardly any risks other than lulling its audience to sleep.  Almost from the moment Polly Noonan opened her mouth, I felt repelled.  Her tinny, whimpering little voice may be appropriate to the childlike character of Mary, but I found it grating and annoying to the ear.  Her lost soul character was almost as irritating as Ruhl's episodic love triangle stretched the bounds of tedium to barely fill its two act format.

Lesson number one in dramatic form to any aspiring playwrights out there: you must give the audience a reason to care about what they are seeing.  Ruhl doesn't.  Her characters are shallow and lack empathy.  The talented director Jessica Thebus doesn't have a lot to work with here, and she has to contend with the awkward set-up of the Piven's two-sided black box configuration.  Scenic Designer John Dalton places a tiny living space in the center of the room (partially obscured for those of us sitting in section B), while a large empty space occupies another side of the room.  Perhaps it was a metaphor intended to suggest the suffocating home life that Mary shares with her childhood sweetheart and later husband Crick and the wide open world of her female "cowboy" friend Red.  Whatever the intent, the effect is that of wasted space.  And that says nothing of the 95 mind-numbing minutes that follow.

Mary (played by Noonan with childlike blankness) is perpetually late, we discover.  Late for dinner, late with her period and late in understanding certain things.  Early in the play her unemployed but loving boyfriend (Lawrence Grimm) convinces her to loan him her life savings of $500.  His reason being that "In a just society, people who have more money should give to those who have less."  We find later he has squandered the money on a "gift" of art for Mary.  When Mary suspects she is pregnant, Crick proposes and they begin to haggle over the details of both the wedding and the expected child's name.  Mother wants the child to have its own unique identity, while father favors convention.

The child is born with complications.  It has both male and female genitals, which are quickly corrected with a little surgery and father Crick accepts that he now has a little girl.  Mary is unsure.  "Why does she have to be one thing or another?" Mary asks.  "Because I won't have my daughter living on a fence," Crick replies.  For all his conventionality, Crick is surprisingly sensitive, weeping over holiday re-runs and feeling a sense of wonder at modern art, which Mary doesn't understand either.  Their child's name is a point of contention.  Crick wants a good "Biblical" name...like Jill.  Mary favors the more neutral sounding Blue, in honor of her friend Red.

This cowboy from Pittsburgh, who makes a good living singing "horse lullabies," represents strength and freedom, qualities Mary can only envy.  Red (Kelli Simpkins) doesn't care what anyone thinks of her, whereas Mary has trouble making simple decisions like whether or not to go for a walk and what food to eat.  She hates the holidays, has no recollection of the normal days in between holidays, and feels the world is spinning too fast.  She also has premonitions that her heart will stop beating and she may catch on fire and explode.  "Maybe you think about things too much," Red advises her.

Crick begins to show jealousy of Mary's new best friend and forbids her to see Red.  Perhaps this vaguely uninteresting play could have been a bittersweet rumination on convention verses non-conformity, but the stakes feel far too low.  The characters are pretty dumb too.  When Mary wonders why she and her husband never go to church anymore, Crick explains "We're not religious," to which Mary answers "Oh, yeah".  With flaccid writing such as this, it is a wonder this playwright was actually a finalist for a Pulitzer (must have been a pretty slow year).  "Late" seems to be urging its characters to live more freely and honestly and less fearfully.  There is a telling moment when Mary opens up two blank fortune cookie messages.  Are they a sign of imminent death, she wonders?  Red comforts her that "a blank fortune is like an open sky".  A blank play, unfortunately is still waiting for something dramatic to happen.

"Late: A Cowboy Song" plays through August 29, 2010 at Piven Theatre Workshop, located in the Noyes Cultural Center at 927 Noyes Street in Evanston.  The play runs 95 minutes with intermission.  Performances are Thursday, Friday and Saturday at 7:30 p.m. and Sunday at 2:30 p.m.  Tickets are $25.  Call (847) 866-8049 or visit www.piventheatre.org.  For more information on this show, please visit the Theatre In Chicago Late: A Cowboy Song page.