Word: hauptman
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...Hauptman's play tells the story of Good 'Ole Boys gone bad. As American drama, Gillette is no masterpiece--which certainly won't prevent it from winning ten Tonys--but at the ART, it is a good 'ole play done well...
Written by William Hauptman...
...WILLIAM Hauptman's last play at the American Repertory Theater, the musical Big River,was a Big Winner, receiving seven Tony awards for its subsequent Broadway production. Can Gillette, his new play about the drifters and desperados in a Wyoming boom town, possible do so well? Will it boom or will it bust...
With its Western setting, dashed dreams and ensuing violence, Gillettemight sound just like another Sam Shepard rip-off. But Hauptman tries to make it clear that he's less interested in the "myth of the West" than in the reality. After all, the play's basic situation--tremendous overcrowding in prisons as well as in 12-hour-shift motels, life-threatening work, and a 10 to 1 male-female ratio--comes straight from real life, circa 1981. The oddness of Gillette's events are due to the oddness of Americans and their American dreams, not ARTesian meta-theatre games...
...HAUPTMAN moves Gillette along quickly and serves up a lot of good one-liners ("I've got nothing against [marriage], except that it's a life without hope"). The goings-on become hilarious in the second act, when the expense and danger from next-door roughnecks push the duo out of their motel and onto the open prairie. There they set up house, a hibachi and Mickey's Roy Orbison records, and they look for romance outside the local jail, waiting for the first newly sprung women--two gold-hearted hookers named Brenda (Dawn Couch) and Cathy (Pamela Gien...