Three individuals traverse the dusty stretch of a mythic West on an odyssey of retribution. They seek to find and dispatch the outlaw who stole a treasured possession. The environment carries manifold resonance: it is an implacable place of cycling threat, possibility, annihilation, hope, alienation, and escape. An existentialist stage. 

Writer Matt Neubauer’s twisty and ambitious script provides a few upsets for the audience. The Texan melodrama that unfolds in the opening moments quickly reveals itself as a fantasy landscape, a projection onto which the trio of troubled characters negotiates their collective anxieties, heartbreak and loss. The opportunity to rise above past strife, to become the larger-than-life heroes of their narratives and drive resolution, is a paramount aspiration.

Initially, the sudden switch from broad Western cadence to natural British inflexion as the characters begin to confess is jarring. It requires a moment of adjustment both aurally and thematically, with Neubauer offering no formal transitional exposition. Maddy Strauss as frontier Sadie is as solid and resolute as the farmland her family has worked for generations, a rancher’s daughter ferociously dedicated to her late father. As a vulnerable civilian, she must reckon with an altogether more complicated paternal legacy of failings and shortcomings. It is her reminiscence of the time she spent watching western films with her father that gives the piece its primary cinematic framework, providing the flight into heightened imagination. George Fletcher has a good old time as laconic gun-for-hire John, tough and independent on the western terrain. Plain John is rather more exasperated and bruised, involved in online scams and left broken by his would-be romantic partner-in-crime. Benjamin Victor, with his captivating wiry translucence, is the standout in both universes as Isaac. The most outwardly fragile, he embodies fierce spiritual rectitude. Lost love haunts his heels as well, nipping. Not one of them is unblemished by experience. Neubauer slightly overwrites the disclosures, challenging his actors with a surfeit of speech.

Ben Kulvichit’s superlative light design bathes the space in a satisfying churn of celluloid saturation, perfectly suggesting the textures of dusty sunsets, oppressively hot days, and cool shadowed evenings. The cast is framed against wide-screen projections of Hollywood films, stunned witnesses to the overwhelming repository of dream and fancy. They yearn to enter this manufactured paradise, spurred on to achieve nirvana (spurs, metaphorical and literal, recur throughout the work). The stark, plaintive notes of Nat Norland’s sound design accompany the characters on their journey, uncertain but anticipatory. Reaching the ocean shore at last, Neubauer grants his characters a moment of grace, a soothing respite, on the cusp of happy-ever-after. 

While not all of the temporal shifts work smoothly, and the pace sometimes meanders, Neubauer crafts a compelling tale of release from the past and the future capacity for reinvention, of prospective change. It’s a wander across the expanse of the traditional western tale, full of potential and expectation.

Read more of Tom’s reviews here!

{🎟 AD – PR invite – Tickets were gifted in exchange for an honest review}

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