Fall of the Legends

citypaper.net exclusive: The legend of James Butler "Wild Bill" Hickok is explored in the seldom-seen 1978 drama with music, Fathers and Sons.

by Mark Cofta

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Published: Apr 4, 2007

The American Western — whether in film, TV series, radio plays, dime novels or pulp fiction (but seldom theater) — has long twisted the nation's growing pains into violent morality plays. The late Thomas Babe explored the inflated legend of James Butler "Wild Bill" Hickok in his seldom-seen 1978 drama with music, Fathers and Sons, given a superbly visceral revival by Norristown's Iron Age Theatre.

Randall Wise and John Doyle, the Iron Age director-designer team, create Carl Mann's saloon in Deadwood, Dakota Territory, in August 1876 on the spacious Centre Theater stage, complete with tinny piano, spittoons, pot-belly stove and trophy animal heads overlooking the action. Genuine cigar smoke provides a convincing haze for their subtle lighting. It lacks only the sweet, sickly smell of cheap whiskey.

Patrick Edward White plays not-so-wild Bill, who at 39 is a near-blind, paranoid drunk, weary of his notoriety. He's tended by Calamity Jane (Kelly Vrooman) and a host of poker-playing sycophants, until young Jack (Adam Altman) arrives spouting outrageous Wild Bill tales.

Babe re-imagines Hickok's real-life killer Jack McCall as his long-lost son, who's grown up tending his abandoned mother and seething at Hickok's ballooning fame. Jack's efforts to separate the man from the legend, and to sort through his complicated feelings for the father he's long imagined but never known, drive this darkly humorous, emotionally and physically violent, play.

Fathers and Sons is punctuated with music — not only James Santangelo's bluesy underscoring, but brief, surprisingly sincere songs that reveal the tortured personalities beneath.

The performances are similarly layered: White's ornery Hickok is a believably tragic, tortured figure, and Markus Zanders' feisty Colorado Charlie, Chuck Beishl's bitter California Joe, and David Fiebert's scheming Pacific Pete are also richly realized. Vrooman's pragmatic Calamity Jane proves well-adjusted to her role as a largely fictitious icon. Kareem Carpenter shines as a fame-hungry assassin, and David Yashin humorously tries to mediate the larger-than-life climactic struggle.

Babe originally wrote Fathers and Sons as "an evocation of the murders at Kent State and Jackson in May 1970," which one wouldn't guess without program notes. But its titanic struggles between generations, and its exposure of the differences between romanticized violence and grim reality, fit the 1870s, the 1970s — and today — all too well.

Fathers and Sons, through April 28,Centre Theater, 208 DeKalb St., Norristown, 610-279-1013 or www.artscc.org

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