Theater Review (NYC): When You Comin' Back, Red Ryder? - Page 2

Teddy is the kind of immediate, flimsy rebel who works within the system, and whom authorities love for the same reason, in Stoppard’s words, that “the Inquisition loved heretics.”  Red, on the other hand, is the kind of rebel who exists outside any particular epoch, what Tom Stoppard described in Rock ‘N’ Roll as the “unbribable” kind of rebel whose ethic “comes from where the Muses come from.”  That side of Red, however, was more apparent in the play's 1983 revival, at a time when youth culture had already undergone repeated boom-and-bust cycles of rage (since the 50s and 60s), and the original burst of punk rock energy had degraded into uniform “Reagan sucks” hardcore.

In 1973, however, it was hard to see that kind of rebel coming back, even in a play that, by the standards of American drama at the time, was particularly locked into the zeitgeist. Clive Barnes described Red Ryder as a character “pathetically out of touch with his time,” not realizing that a new streak of anti-hippie rebellion was about to arise. When You Comin’ Back, Red Ryder? came out in the same year as Iggy and the Stooges released their defiantly anti-hippie proto-punk classic Raw Power, and right after Jonathan Richman’s Modern Lovers had recorded their seminal self-titled anti-rock album.

In the wake of the failures of the hippies came a wave of culture that sought to tap into the more primal nature of rebellion. It shoudn’t be that surprising, then, that Medoff would eventually write a sequel to When You Comin’ Back, Red Ryder? that adjusted to those changes. In 1989’s The Heart Outright, we see Red seven years later, bearing more than a passing resemblance to the punk-influenced Travis Bickle of Taxi Driver.

Yet, instead of reinvigorating the universal rebel figure that was behind both John Wayne and Johnny Rotten, Retro Productions director Ric Sechrest turns in a rather stale production here, loyal to the somewhat dated spirit of the original production. Rather than seeming tough and distant, Ben Schnickel plays Red as wimpy and ineffective as he’s always been. In fact, he’s so wimpy that he’s almost indistinguishable from the ultra-square Richard (David Blais). Towards the end of the play Richard’s wife Clarisse (Matilda Szydagis) begins to trust Red a lot more than she does her husband; the script demands that something about Red’s attitude allows the audience see why. In Sechrest’s production, Richard is arguably tougher than Red, which means we end up following what the script is telling us more than what the production is showing us.

Article Author: Ethan Stanislawski

Ethan Stanislawski is a freelance journalist/critic and new media specialist. He is a regular reviewer and staff writer at Prefix Magazine, and also contributes regularly to Blogcritics Magazine. His interests include theater, film, and pop music …

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