Kinky plot highlights Haidle's kink-less production

"Spaghetti Western," a senior thesis play by Noah Haidle '01, evokes with its title the cowboy and Indian "B movies" that were filmed in Italy and Spain after the Second World War.

Yet the title of Haidle's play does more than locate his cast of characters in time and space. It suggests the role of the movies in fostering certain perilous assumptions about American manhood.

"Spaghetti" brings to mind flaccidity, slipperiness, the expression "wet noodle" — all of which are qualities American society has long assigned to homosexuals. "Western," on the other hand, recalls America's mythical frontier, where chap clad cowboys found freedom, work and testosterone-infused violence.

The words spaghetti and western, therefore, propose two seemingly irreconcilable visions of what it means to be a man. Haidle's play argues that these two visions have one crucial thing in common: They are both bunk. And, as bunk magnified and distorted by the lenses of Hollywood cameras, these visions of American manhood pervert the way men relate to themselves, to one another, and to women. "Spaghetti Western" is the story of Vance LaVon (Matthieu Boyd '03), the most celebrated on-screen "dier" of his time. Vance, one imagines, is John Wayne's doppelganger. Like the archetypal character Wayne plays in most of his films, Vance — both on and off-screen — is rugged, independent, cunning, fearless, never petty and perhaps a little insane. Yet Vance is the "other," the man in the black mask, the villain that Hollywood scripting fates to die at the end each film.

Vance is also a homosexual. In 1976 he falls in love with a fledgling actor named Lynn Bardot (Charlie Hewson '04) and will stop at nothing to convince Lynn to love him back. When simple wooing fails, Vance resorts to blackmail. The action of the play then leaves Italy for the United States, where it resumes at chic Hollywood homes and parties.

A love quadrangle fast develops with Vance, Lynn, Lynn's wife, Vicky (Erin Gilley '02), and the producer Jimmy Feingold (Doug Schachtel '01) at its corners. This untenable alignment of affections has cataclysmic consequences for all involved. But that's only the first act.

After intermission, the narrative leaps forward to the year 2001. The child of Lynn and Vicky, Dean Bardot (also played by Hewson), joins the milieu. Dean, a televangelist with an encyclopedic knowledge of the Bible, purveys his abject disdain for his parents and his homophobia to American households.

From the beginning of the second act, these characters seem destined for a "high noon" show down. This ultimately occurs at "Happy Trails Naturist Ranch," a heathens' paradise where a racy German butler (Kevin Simmons '03) and a Hollywood screenwriter (John Portlock '01) attend to the fatally ill LaVon.

The uniformly strong cast meets the high expectations of the play's script. Boyd and Schachtel earn special kudos for their particularly successful performances. Boyd invests LaVon with a complexity befitting his character. He is hard and aggressive, but the audience can't help but pity him. Schachtel's role deftly delivers comic relief to what would otherwise be a tumble weed-ridden landscape of despair.

Director Tomoko Minami '01 also merits applause for her ability to work with the playwright in developing a kink-less production. "Spaghetti Western" recalls a string of recent films that use a rapid-fire montage technique to drive along the story line. Vance even references — with ironic opprobrium — Quentin Tarantino, one of the modern masters of this technique.

The look and feel of this play, however, has a more recent and more equivalent precedent in Paul Thomas Anderson's film "Magnolia."

Both "Spaghetti Western" and "Magnolia" imagine Hollywood as place that upends individuals, breaks up families, and annihilates dreams and illusions.

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Dean's flamboyant public speaking recalls Frank T.J. Mackey, Tom Cruise's character in "Magnolia." So too LaVon seems to have a filmic antecedent in Mackey's father, Earl Partridge.

Moreover, as in the film, there is a cathartic moment in "Spaghetti Western" when the entire cast breaks into song.

"Spaghetti Western" is an excitingly original play and there is no sense in trying to establish a one to one correspondence between it and Magnolia. The comparison is justified only because it helps to underscore the aesthetic Haidle, Minami and the cast have successfully translated from film to theater.

"Spaghetti Western" runs this weekend with performances tonight, tomorrow and Sunday at 8 p.m. and Saturday at 7:30 p.m. and 10:30 p.m. in Matthews Acting Studio.