Jack Kelly Bellue and Miranda Lopez Lechuga had been talking about doing Cowboy Mouth for a while, with no date and no director and no money behind any of it. Last year, Lopez Lechuga went to look at a church.
“The dots connected about where we could do it,” she says. The building she had walked into was the Church of Saint Mary the Virgin, on West 46th Street. “It just feels so meant to be.”
On August 28, that church will become a wrecked motel room. Bellue will play Slim and Lopez Lechuga will play Cavale, the characters Sam Shepard and Patti Smith wrote for themselves at the Chelsea Hotel.
“They started talking, and then he started typing,” Bellue says. “Then he passed the typewriter to her, she would type, and he would pass it. They had no plot in mind. They would just type, pass, type.”
In April 1971, the play premiered at the Traverse in Edinburgh before transferring to New York’s American Place Theatre, where the two of them played the parts. It ran second on a double bill, following Shepard’s Back Bog Beast Bait, which starred his estranged wife. Shepard walked out after opening night and left town, and the production closed within days. In the fifty-five years since, Cowboy Mouth has resurfaced intermittently, though no definitive staging has emerged and no recording circulates.
“We have nothing but the script,” Lopez Lechuga says. “Every production has to decide for itself what Cowboy Mouth is. If we were to do Rent, we know exactly what that looks like. The beauty here is that no one knows what this looks like.”
I met the two of them on a Sunday afternoon in July, two weeks before tickets went on sale. They are both 22.
“You walk into the auditions, and you’re going up against this 30-year-old who’s been on tours and Broadway,” Lopez Lechuga says. “Nobody gives you grace. The expectation is the same. You cannot wait to be chosen.”
Which is most of the argument for producing your own work. “It’s such an entrepreneurship,” Bellue says. “We are the CEO. You are crafting everything. We’ve run into every possible problem thus far, and that’s not even to come.” Bellue also runs Play Club, the company presenting this production.
Their first plan had been to do all of it themselves: direct it, produce it, stage manage it, costume it, star in it. “And then we were like, this is fucking hard,” Lopez Lechuga says. They had read the script aloud to each other at home, for fun, with no show attached, and neither of them could crack it. The name they both landed on was Kyle Pleasant, a choreographer who taught them during the single year they spent at Marymount and who they hadn’t seen in years when they called.
He came in and took most of it away. They had shown up to the first rehearsal with a shopping list: drums to learn, a dead crow, props, effects.
“He’s like, none of it exists. It’s all imagination,” Bellue says. “It exists in a world that is so ambiguous in timeline, so ambiguous in absolutely every possible way. Like, who the fuck are these people? We’re gonna start from nothing. So what do we know? Okay, read the first thing. Okay, there’s a fucked up bed. Okay, now there’s a bed.”
“We’re gonna come in with the same approach that Patti and Sam would’ve,” Bellue says. Pleasant is building the play in the order the script hands things over, which is roughly the order Shepard and Smith wrote it in.
The staging is in the round, with the playing space in the middle and the audience on every side of it, close enough to be a problem.
“We want the audience to be an interruption,” Lopez Lechuga says. “To walk into these people’s lives and come out feeling changed.”
That leaves the question of what Slim and Cavale actually look like. The productions Lopez Lechuga has come across tend to come pre-costumed, and both actors are wary of landing there. “We don’t want to feel like we’re putting on the costume of rock and roll,” she says. “We want it to feel like it fits.”
The look is coming out of their apartment instead, a place full of propeller hats and costumes, where they run around and throw things everywhere and visitors keep telling them it’s beautiful.
“Our rock and roll is ribbons and records,” Bellue says. “That’s how we sort of see these characters exist in our lives.” The alternative would have been to read Patti Smith and then leather stud it up. “Rock and roll is about freedom. If we are Slim and Cavale, then we are going to be Slim and Cavale.”
Bellue frames the ambition a size larger. “The one thing I hope to gain from this is the pressure to become even a fragment of the artists that they were. Patti Smith is responsible for Downtown New York culture. How can we continue to honor or build off of that?”
Lopez Lechuga is already past it. Next year they’ll be better actors, in a different space, with different blocking and a different audience in front of them. They shot promo photos a few weeks ago and were laughing about it at the time: Jack, we’re going to look back at these and think we were such babies.
“You’re only as good as you are right now,” she says. “This is what I have to give today, and I’m gonna work my ass off. But at the end of the day, this is just a showcase of where I’m at and where we’re at.”
Cowboy Mouth, a Play Club production directed by Kyle Pleasant, runs one night only on Thursday, August 28 at the Church of Saint Mary the Virgin, 145 West 46th Street, New York. Doors 7:30pm, curtain 8pm. Tickets on sale August 1 at cowboymouthnyc.eventbrite.com.
