Word: ryders
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...WALK into the Loeb Ex before the beginning of When You Comin' Back, Red Ryder?, you are confronted by a reconstruction of a sleazy small-town diner and an actor dressed in greaser attire with a tattoo that says "Born Dead" on his arm smoking a cigarette as if it were a joint. Somehow it seems like a good time to go home and watch George Scott ground into double plays...
...Ryder is at times a brutal, violent play. Teddy savages and humiliates his victims mentally and physically with relentless sadism. He is so belligerent that one wonders how he could have been driven to such a state of mind, and Medoff offers no real explanations. Teddy is a war veteran and a "disaffected youth," but somehow this does not adequately explain his attitude toward humanity. All too often he becomes more of an authorial mouthpiece than a coherent character, and when he says at the end that he wishes he could be sorry for what he has done it really...
...play lives or dies with the lead characters: Red Ryder, a young man trapped in a small town in New Mexico who puts on a James Dean, grease-and-tattoos front of tough independence to hide his inability to break free of his oppressive life; Teddy, a disaffected, belligerant hippie who passes through the small town; and Richard, a rich businessman whose suave manner belies his actual spinelessness...
...acts of the play are set in a greasy spoon diner in a one-horse New Mexico town. The play opens with Red Ryder boldly announcing his plans to leave his stifling job as night man at the greasy spoon and hit the big time. He vents his frustration by bullying the pitiful, obese, waitress, Angel, who is quite apparently in love with him, though he scorns...
...next to arrive are Richard and his wife, Clarisse, pulling up their Cadillac for a meal. Richard is cool, successful and wealthy, everything Red Ryder wishes he were and is not. Clarisse is a concert violinist with an $11,000 violin which Richard has bought for her, more to ensure her dependence on him than to show his love. At first, she is little more than an extension of Richard, he gets her everything he thinks she wants without listening to a word from...