The Western Holdup Play: The Pilgrimage Continues

Abstract

R U D O L F E R B E N The University of New Mexico The Western Holdup Play: The Pilgrimage Continues With The Petrified Forest (1935), Robert E. Sherwood introduced to America a new dramatic genre, which we can call the western holdup play. Sherwood’s play and the holdup formula have subsequently become the model for such significant western American plays as William Inge’s Bus Stop (1955), Mark Medoff’s When You Comin Back, Red Ryder? (1973), Lanford Wilson’s Angels Fall (1982), and Marsha Norman’s The Holdup (1983). Structurally, the western holdup play builds on an old dramatic con­ vention, known by such diverse names as the “lifeboat” or the “snow­ bound” genre. Though obviously contrived and conducive more to thought and talk than action and plot, the formula ensures dramatic unity and brings together characters who would not otherwise have met. Imprisoned by forces beyond their control, strangers start questioning themselves and one another under the pressure of confinement. When they are finally released, they have not only gained existential insights, but their lives are changed. Despite shared characteristics with the older models, the five plays I selected constitute a particular genre, and I believe that the term “holdup play” clears up terminological confusions. In addition to suggesting the westemness of the plays, this term allows for variations within the genre that do not easily fit into the category of the “lifeboat” or “snowbound” play. As Walter Kerr says about the “snowbound” play, a group may be forced to “remain where it is until the weather or the gunsmoke clears.”1 Accordingly, holdups of a different nature occur in the western holdup play. While the characters in Bus Stop are, indeed, snowbound, those in Angels Fall are trapped by a nuclear accident. And old-time or modern-day desperadoes hold everyone captive in The Petrified Forest, When You Comin Back, Red Ryder?, and The Holdup. 312 Western American Literature The western subject matter distinguishes the holdup play from its predecessors. Not only the characters have arrived at a crossroad, but the American West as well; the old and the new West meet in the plays. With the exception of the midwestern Bus Stop, they are set in the rural South­ west where, according to Ima Honaker Herron in The Small Town in American Drama, “isolated communities saved from revolutionary change by the West’s vast expanse” exist still today.2All the plays take place in desolate outposts, consisting of little more than a diner or a gas station located along remote highway stretches or a lonely crossroad. Even before the holdup occurs, these communities are conspicuously out of place, out of time. For the passers-by, whether travelers or drifters, the small communities are way stations;for those who stay and only long to get away, dead-ends. Thus, the western holdup play presents the American West in dra­ matic tension, between past and present, process and place. As Victor Turner says about pilgrims on a mythical journey, the dramatic characters encounter dangers, which change their “inner and sometimes outer con­ dition,” as they pass “from structure to structure through communitas.”3 The holdup forces the characters to confront a similar frontier experience to that of the western settlers; it transforms them until they become them­ selves a “total symbol, a symbol of totality.”4 Thus, they symbolize the American West in change. In The Petrified Forest, Sherwood portrays the American West at a breaking-point. Like many other plays of the 1930s, Sherwood’s play reflects the generally grim mood of America during the Depression. But unlike most of these plays from the 1930s, The Petrified Forest examines the impact of the Depression on a region that had remained largely rural and given the nation its most enduring myth. It was not until the 1930s, Robert G. Athearn points out, that the western “myth of unlimited possi­ bilities had run aground on the reality of drought, depression, and agricul­ tural desolation.”5 Consequently, the Depression constitutes a watershed in western American history comparable to the closing of the frontier in 1890. The setting and the characters in The Petrified Forest provide symbols...