Late: A Cowboy Song

This early effort by MacArthur winner Ruhl has had only a scattering of student and community productions since its 2005 Houston debut. Watching Late dispels any puzzlement about this production history: It is a wretched play. The plot, encapsulated, may sound intriguing: A woman, trapped in a relationship with a needy, modernism-obsessed museum guard, finds freedom in an erotically tinged friendship with a female singing cowboy. But at every turn in her execution of this tale, Ruhl opts for precious sentimentality and whimsical abstraction at the expense of anything like recognizable human thought or emotion.

En route to a Chinese restaurant, Mary (Noonan) asks cowboy Red (Simpkins) how she thinks Vietnamese or Korean people feel about serving food to Americans, what with all the wars and all. And what were those wars about, anyway? “It seems like wars are always North versus South,” observes Red. After an hour of this sort of thing, you feel as though you’re trapped in a never-ending writing workshop for gifted and talented teens.

Thebus and Noonan have a long history of collaboration with Ruhl, which appears to have been of almost no help in rendering this production watchable. No one connects: Simpkins’s remote Red, strumming a half-tuned guitar, seems to attract Noonan’s sappy and ingenuous Mary primarily by leaving her alone, unlike Grimm’s relentless, spazzy Crick. A late-breaking fantasia on holidays comes off as awkward and disjointed. One positive note: Stephan Mazurek supplies some pretty projections of clouds.

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