About the Blue Cowboy by Laurie Stone

One day, I was on the phone with playwright and actor David Cale, and he was telling me about shooting a movie in Montana, where a cowboy gave him a cowboy hat. He wears it all the time. He wouldn’t let it go, even when he returned to New York. People started flirting with him who had never sniffed around before. Is that hat the seed of his latest monologue, Blue Cowboy? Sort of.

In 2021, Cale was invited to Ketchum, Idaho, for a residency at the house where Ernest Hemingway lived. When Cale learned that Hemingway had committed suicide in the house, in 1961, he was horrified and bought a plane ticket home. Then these deer appeared at the window of the house, and Cale stood looking into the eyes of a male deer. It was a staring contest. And because Cale fell for the doe’s eyes, he took it as a sign he should stay. Was the stag the seed of the monologue? Sort of.

Ketchum, Idaho is crazy about dogs. This may be the most dog-centric place in America. Cale said that if someone crosses the street with a dog, every car stops to let them pass, and no animal shelter in the area can kill a dog. Never. Is the dog the seed of David’s monologue? Sure, why not.

After deciding to stay, one day he biked into town—he didn’t drive. He wanted to see something called the “sheep trail,” a special day when fifteen thousand sheep are herded from the cooler climes of the mountains to the warmer regions below, and on this occasion two cowboys in a car throw candy to the children. One of the cowboys threw candy at Cale. It’s a Tootsie Roll. Is Tootsie Roll the germ that caused the work? That was it.

I can tell you this with confidence because Tootsie Roll is an expression of love, or sex, or sudden travel to an unknown planet, or whatever you call that electricity that makes you want to sit down and write. In three weeks, Cale had finished his draft Blue Cowboy. It was the fastest he ever wrote.

Last week, Richard and I drove from Hudson to Brooklyn to see Cale perform a monologue at the Bushwick Starr theater—which runs there through November 8th. The journey was an expression of our love as the traffic tried to kill us by jamming and crawling.

In the article, a narrator named Andrew—a writer from New York—comes to Ketchum, Idaho, on an assignment, and there he meets a ranch hand named Will, who has thrown a Tootsie Roll at him from a car window. Andrew falls in love with Will, and Andrew falls in love with Shelley, Will’s two-year-old, blue-eyed Australian shepherd. As soon as Shelley saw Andrew, she jumped up and put her paws on him. By the way, in a moment of attraction, we all wish we could do it if we weren’t human.

The love story between Andrew and Will is slow and fast, dizzying and tender, with a Brokeback Mountain vibe—the film is referenced when Will says he saw it and liked it. This comes to a head when Andrew tries to understand what Will feels about being gay, closeted, and living in a boy-girl culture. Will doesn’t know how he feels, and part of the beauty of this story is the space Andrew offers him to come and go without knowing why. One of its beauties is the space Cale offers the audience to wonder about love and loneliness as he embodies both.

Will is a mystery, not only in terms of what he wants with his life and why he spends time with Andrew, but because we see him only through his dialogue and through the actions Andrew tells us about.. We only have Andrew’s interiority, as he discovers who he is with Will. We have a way of working our minds that makes us fall in love, because Andrew is busy looking for things to love and ways to love them.

In one scene, Will and Andrew are returning from reading cowboy poetry, and Will wants to stop so they can hug. After that, he became tense. Andrew reports their conversation:

“It is okay, dear.”

“Did you just call me ‘darling’?”

“Yes. It was an accident. No, it wasn’t an accident. I called you ‘darling.’ ”

“Never before has a man called me ‘darling’.”

“I’ve never called a man ‘darling’ before. So, now we’re equal.”

As we got closer to Ketchum—”I’m going to sleep at my house tonight. I need to think about a lot of things. I’ll come tomorrow, if you want. I’m off Sunday.”

In my house alone, I thought, you can’t save him. Will isn’t one of those injured wild birds you used to keep as a kid. He was really involved in some things. You have to step back. As I was thinking about this, a message came in—”Are you still awake? Can I come?” And twenty minutes later he walked in like nothing had happened.

Communication between audience and actor is not passive in the comfortable atmosphere of the theater and in the intimacy of Cale’s performance. Almost immediately, the viewer becomes a dog, following the scent of love wherever it goes. We trusted Cale to guide us without asking anything.

On the phone, Cale told me that people were coming up to him after the show and saying, “Have you heard from Will?” He said, “Not yet.” They asked, “How is Shelley?” Even Cale’s director, Les Waters, believes the whole incident happened. They didn’t. Even when you write about something you lived, writing turns it into fiction according to your order and what you keep and leave behind. Do you want to hold an audience? Start from the middle. Failed to arrive. Make the audience hot. Make the audience laugh.

What I want to convey to you is how thrilling it is to sit across from a master storyteller in real time, in a physical setting, surrounded by other bodies. A man is on stage, and he’s talking directly to you. He’s telling you a story, and you’re out on the savannah with your prehuman friends, and you’re at a table in Paris, and he’s leaning in towards you. He stirred the molecules in the air, and all of us present felt it at the same time. We vibrate as a whole happier and more alive than our eccentric routes to get there combined.

Laurie Stone is the author of six books, most recently Streaming Now: Postcards of What’s Happening, long-listed for the PEN America Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for Essay Arts. He writes the column Notes on Another New Life for Parents Magazine, and Substack is Everything is Private.