COWBOY MOUTH to Play One Night at Church of St. Mary the Virgin
Kyle Pleasant directs Jack Kelly Bellue and Miranda Lopez Lechuga in the Patti Smith and Sam Shepard collaboration.
Play Club will present Patti Smith and Sam Shepard's Cowboy Mouth for a single performance at the Church of Saint Mary the Virgin on Friday, August 28. Doors open at 7:30 PM; the performance begins at 8:00 PM.
Directed by Kyle Pleasant, the production stars Jack Kelly Bellue as Slim and Miranda Lopez Lechuga as Cavale. In the play, Cavale pulls Slim off the street to remake him into the rock and roll savior she is convinced the world needs: a "saint . . . with a cowboy mouth," as the play itself puts it.
Smith and Shepard wrote Cowboy Mouth together in 1971, near the end of their relationship, and played Slim and Cavale themselves when it premiered that April at the American Place Theatre, on the same block of West 46th Street where Play Club will now stage it, fifty-five years later. The original run barely outlasted its opening. Within days, Shepard left New York, ending both the show and the relationship it was drawn from.
Play Club is built around play reading as a social literary practice, alongside its residency at the Andrew Heiskell Braille and Talking Book Library. A debut production of a play co-written by two writers of Smith and Shepard's standing was an easy call. Choosing the venue took more consideration. The Church of Saint Mary the Virgin, known locally as "Smoky Mary's" for its heavy use of incense, was completed in 1895 around a steel skeleton frame hidden entirely behind its stonework: the first church built that way anywhere in the world. It has stood in the middle of Broadway's theater district ever since, holding Solemn Mass with Latin plainchant every week for more than 130 years.
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