The centerpiece of Carl L. Williams’ Under a Cowboy Moon, now playing at the Vienna Theatre Company (VCT), is a cowboy poetry competition, a kind of poetry slam taking place in a small bar in a dried-up, dying, West Texas town.
Like perhaps many people who have lived primarily in urban, Eastern environments, I had no idea what cowboy poetry sounded like. Here’s an example, generated by ChatGPT:
Out where the sage and silence meet,
The prairie winds don’t miss a beat.
My boots are worn, my hat sits low,
Chasing the sun where wild herds go.
The campfire flickers, stars appear,
Coyotes singing where none can hear.
A lonesome tune, a life untamed,
A cowboy’s heart can’t be contained.
In depopulated Spitwhistle, Texas, the Saddle Horn Bar can attract only a handful of contestants. There’s the young Henry Burke (Jaye Frazier), a poetry rookie competing for the first time. Frazier’s Burke is appropriately insecure and callow. In counterpoint, Williams gives us Boone Hawkins (Raymond G. Gagliardi), a longtime veteran of the cowboy poetry world, who shows genuine kindness to Henry. I’d have liked Boone’s hair and makeup to be more suggestive of the older Willie Nelson, better to portray the character’s near-the-end-of-the-trail situation in life.
Then there’s Rafe Cainfield (Scott Stofkost), all ego and loudness, with nary a nuance in sight. He’s accompanied by his just-short-of-bimbo girlfriend, Terri Blair (Kim Paul), who by show’s end begins to get a clue about her boyfriend’s character.
The final contestant is Michael Tibbets (Chris Dockins), a UT Austin English professor who, under a pseudonym, visits the contest to analyze cowboy poetry. Excessively erudite and egregiously pretentious, Michael is a portrait of everything people love to hate about academia. Dockins does get one of the best comic bits of the evening, as Michael delivers a cowboy poetry adaptation of a portion of T.S. Eliot’s The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, with a hilarious reference to western novel writer Louis L’Amour.
While Michael’s English Department take on life may not cut much ice with the bar patrons, it does gain the attention of Rebecca Proctor (Janice Zuker), a PBS producer there to record the contest and interview the locals for a documentary. She hangs on Michael’s every word, and romantic attraction blooms. In her way, Rebecca is as much a satire on PBS documentarians as Michael is of humanities professors. Williams wrote the play in 2007; the notion of a PBS reporter showing up at a small town gathering today, let alone with a humanities grant in hand, has a considerably more ironic edge.
Jon Roberts makes an excellent impression as Simon Dawes, Rebecca’s cameraman, whose manner is more laconic than that of any of the cowboys, making occasional wry, often delightful, comments on the goings-on.
The bar owner, P.A. Carswell (Liz LeBoo), is a pillar of what remains of the community. LeBoo gives a grounded portrayal of someone whose dreams of the future have a low horizon: to go to Texarkana and work with her sister in a diner. Her life is in contrast to that of Jill Milligan (Shelby Kaplan), who is finishing up a business degree at UT, and who therefore has a chance of escaping small town topor.
P.A.’s former boyfriend, Deuce Whatley (Charlie Boone), a regular at the bar, still hopes to rekindle their romance. While Under a Cowboy Moon is not a romcom, Deuce and P.A. through most of the play have some of the bickering banter interaction typical of many romcom characters. They are the two characters who are most credible as people who have long lived in a place like Spitwhistle.
Director Jessie Roberts keeps the pace consistent and the movement clear. In this she is well aided by lighting designer Nicholas Boone, whose tight area lighting provides the equivalent of close-ups to, for example, two characters talking at a table while the other characters are in low light. Kudos to sound designer Myer Kim for selecting pre-show and intermission country music that is credible for the time and setting, rather than samples of the generic, and synthetic, Nashville sound. Carol Pappas’ costumes suit the characters well; one particularly nice example is Rafe’s outfit for the recital of his poem, every bit as showy as Rafe’s personality.
Its humor and local color notwithstanding, Under a Cowboy Moon is a rather melancholy play, portraying the long, slow decline of a way of life and a community. In this, it called to my mind the brilliantly written A Texas Trilogy by Preston Jones. These three 1970s plays take place in the West Texas town of Bradleyville, realized in far greater depth than Williams’ Spitwhistle. Theater groups would do well to revive any or all of Jones’ three plays, which provide roles that good actors would crave.
Running Time: One hour and 45 minutes, including one intermission.
Under a Cowboy Moon plays through November 2, 2025, presented by Vienna Theatre Company performing at Vienna Community Center, 120 Cherry St SE, Vienna, VA. Tickets, priced at $16, are available online or in person at the Vienna Community Center.
Note: The air conditioning (not under VCT’s control) can make conditions in the theater uncomfortably cold. It would be prudent to prepare accordingly.
