Variations on a Theme: Dust Bowl's Most Famous Con Man

Drought had a shattering effect on the Great Plains. Crops needed water and the sickly plants were exposed to high temperature, winds, insect infestation and dust storms. Once covered with native plains grass, the land was planted with wheat and row crops, leaving the ground exposed. Cattle ranching introduced animals that needed certain kind of grasses and trampled the ground. The Dust Bowl was a man-made disaster.

For nearly a decade, these conditions drove hope from the hearts of the people in these areas. Out of desperation, they moved to Arizona and to California. They were called Okies and Arkies, but among them were also Texans from the high and lower Plains.

John Steinbeck in his classic, The Grapes of Wrath, described the desperation of one family as they migrated looking for work. John Ford directed the 1940 movie starring Henry Fonda as Tom Joad.

But N. Richard Nash's view of the drought in The Rainmaker is more lyrical and hopeful.

The Play

Beginning as a television play in 1952, N. Richard Nash's The Rainmaker became a Broadway play a year later at the Cort Theatre, starring Geraldine Page as the spinster Lizzie Curry and Darren McGavin as the drifting con man, Bill Starbuck.

Opening on Oct. 28, 1954, the play closed on Feb. 12, 1955 after 125 performances. But this wasn't quite the end of Nash's play. The play is about a woman who wants to marry but is too honest and too plain to easily find a husband. She cooks and cleans and mends for her brothers, but can't get the hang of flirting. If she had a gun, she'd be Annie Oakley who in Annie Get Your Gun, complained in song that "you can't get a man with a gun."

Into her life comes a nomadic con man, Bill Starbuck. He convinces her father to gamble $100. Starbuck claims that within 24 hours he'll bring rain to the parched land. Sending the Curry men off to do various things to help with this rain making, he slowly seduces Lizzie. But his seduction isn't just a con. He's also a lonely dreamer hoping for someone to believe in his dreams and he attempts to make her realize that as a woman, she is beautiful. To Starbuck, every woman has beauty as long as she believes that she's a woman.

Starbuck is a dreamer for whom real life is filled with too many disappointments. Lizzie does have one admirer, the plain spoken town sheriff, File. Claiming to be a widower, File's ex-wife actually ran off with another man. Afraid and disappointed, File won't openly show his interest in Lizzie. And when Starbuck asked Lizzie to go away with him, the sheriff finally makes his feelings clear, asking Lizzie to stay and marry him.

Article Author: Purple Tigress

Former theater critic for the LA Weekly and Los Angeles Times . For the last five years, an editing slave at a dot-com but recently laid off. Currently an under-employed freelance writer and artist.

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