Review: A Clown Yearns to Be a Cowboy in And Then the Rodeo Burned Down

Unless you’re keyed into New York City’s downtown theater scene, you probably haven’t heard of Xhloe and Natasha. The playwriting and performing duo of Xhloe Rice and Natasha Roland has been active for about a decade, especially at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, where they won the festival’s Fringe First Award for Outstanding New Writing three years in a row. Last year, they brought two of those award-winning shows, A Letter to Lyndon B. Johnson or God: Whoever Reads This First and What If They Ate the Baby?, to NYC’s SoHo Playhouse, where their distinctive style struck those who saw them with the force of a revelation. Now, they bring the earliest of those shows, And Then the Rodeo Burned Down, to Ars Nova for their off-Broadway debut.

A fascinating sensibility is emerging among these three shows. Xhloe and Natasha are working in the clowning tradition, bringing an energetic yet graceful physicality to their stage movements while donning the expected multicolored face paint. When it comes to the subjects they tackle, though, they go deeper than most clowns. Set in the 1960s, A Letter to Lyndon B. Johnson or God satirized Boy Scout-inspired machismo while empathizing with boys’ adolescent yearning. In What If They Ate the Baby?, the duo combined precise choreography, near-incantatory repetition, and telling silences to dazzling effect in revealing the menacing fear and closeted queerness underneath the ’50s squeaky-clean suburban-housewife archetype.

Like Lyndon B. Johnson or God, And Then the Rodeo Burned Down finds Xhloe and Natasha playing around with masculine stereotypes. Xhloe plays Dale, a rodeo clown who aspires to be a cowboy. Natasha, meanwhile, plays a variety of characters who challenge Dale’s idealism, including a shadow, a narcissistic adult cowboy named Barnaby, and a bull named Arnold. The two performers show off their physical chops most impressively in interstitial sequences in which they both engage in stylized forms of shit-shoveling. As for the dialogue scenes, though they abound in visual and verbal humor (fake cigarettes falling from the ceiling becoming a running gag throughout, for instance), Xhloe and Natasha never allow the free-floating comic anarchy to overwhelm the heart of Dale’s story: that of a young innocent getting tastes of the adult complications—personal, professional, even sexual—on his horizon.

Or, at least, that’s the story that Rodeo seems to commit to in its first half. But when the lights suddenly go out, they slowly go back up (Angelo Sagnelli is the show’s lighting designer) on Xhloe and Natasha playing different characters—themselves, or at least performers who had just been playing Dale, Barnaby, Arnold, etc. In other words, Rodeo goes metatheatrical, with the duo trying to come up with an ending while lamenting that they don’t have the money to complete their work.

This narrative swerve doesn’t come entirely out of nowhere. The show tellingly begins and ends with “9 to 5,” the classic Dolly Parton song about the indignities of the daily grind. Dale’s willingness to subject himself to humiliation for the sake of becoming a cowboy could be applied to any working stiff slaving away at a job for the sake of a promotion, pay raise, etc., that may never come. For artists like Xhloe and Natasha, that translates into their struggle to keep the lights on while attempting to fully realize their work of art.

Such self-reflexive insularity may resonate more with those who are more deeply familiar with Xhloe and Natasha’s previous work. And yet, the sheer imagination, meticulousness, and exuberance with which they realize and execute their vision gleefully come across. They, along with co-director Tom Costello, certainly make the most of their increased resources this time around. Scenic designer Emmie Finckel has decked the Ars Nova performance space out in colorful in-the-round rodeo regalia, fully complementing the equally eye-catching cowboy costumes courtesy of Xhloe, Natasha, and Christopher E. Ford. The two creator-performers also worked with Carsen Joenk on the sound design, which features subtle manipulations to “9 to 5,” “(You’re the) Devil in Disguise,” and “Ring of Fire” to bring out a menacing quality underneath.

Higher budget or not, And Then the Rodeo Burned Down still feels like a handcrafted Xhloe and Natasha project through and through, one that explores classic American iconography in aesthetically inventive ways that make us think as much as laugh. Though it doesn’t quite reach the sublime heights of their other shows, it still offers enough to demonstrate why they deserve to be considered two of the finest theater makers currently working.