Review: Blue Cowboy, David Cale’s Riveting Idaho Fling

David Cale has a story to tell, and you better have a seat, because it’s a good one. The writer of solo plays like Harry Clarke and Sandra (both performed by other people) personally takes the stage of the Bushwick Starr for the world premiere of Blue Cowboy, an intimate tale of unexpected romance in the American west.

Cale plays Andrew, a writer who reluctantly travels to Sun Valley, Idaho, on the dime of an inexplicably wealthy young producer who would like to commission a screenplay about a celebrity who is abducted by a fan from their Sun Valley home. Andrew thinks it’s been done before, but it’s 2021, the waning days of Covid, and this is an opportunity to escape New York City for one of the most beautiful parts of the country for a whole month.

While attending a sheep parade in Ketchum, he locks eyes with a handsome man in a black cowboy hat who tosses him a Tootsie Roll from a truck. He sees the man two days later when his Australian Shepherd runs over and jumps up on Andrew, like an old friend. Small talk turns into a spontaneous trip to see No Time to Die, which leads to a late-night chat over far too many glasses of wine. You can feel the anticipation in the air as Cale unfurls each new will-they-or-won’t-they detail.

Cale is a master of the less-is-more school of solo performance. Seated on a black stool behind a microphone stand, he’s like a refugee from the Moth. His conversational style suggests a confession over tumblers of whisky in a deserted 10th Avenue bar. And his apologetic shoulders and slightly weary expression seem immutable, as if this is the only character we’re ever going to get. But then his eyes narrow to a squint and the English damp evaporates from his voice, leaving the dry western growl of Will, a lonely 39-year-old divorcé gingerly embarking on his first love affair with another man, simultaneously eager and terrified.

Director Les Waters supports Cale’s captivating performance with sparing design. Mextly Couzin focuses our vision with suggestive lighting, inviting us into those bedtime moments when it’s just two voices in the dark. Tei Blow gives us the gentle, almost alien sound of Elk when a herd passes by the house. The large cutout of a bull Elk, which is the most notable part of Colleen Murray’s set, almost seems like overkill, although it does give us a sense of the enormity of an animal whose sharp branching antlers are both majestic and terrifying—which seems like a metaphor for something.

Andrew and Will’s romance is so riveting because it seems so impossible: One is a 60-something creative living in New York City, the other a cowboy young enough to be his son, whose ranch work brings him into daily contact with unreconstructed homophobes. We know it will never work, but we still want to believe, because Cale makes us believe.

As much as this is the titillating story of a holiday fling, Blue Cowboy is the quiet tragedy of society’s gravitational pull, how the boxes we tick and the roads we walk in early adulthood begin to feel like traps come middle age. But it’s also about the power of love to transgress those borders. In the age of marketing algorithms and social atomization, this story of a beautiful and fleeting human connection feels like liberation.