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The Old-Weird-America Pleasures of Dead Outlaw
From the team behind The Band’s Visit, another musical that is more than meets the eye.
In an equally compelling number, much more sincere than satirical, Trent Saunders lights up the story of Andy Payne, a runner from the Cherokee Nation in Oklahoma who won the Trans-Continental Footrace in 1928 — running from Los Angeles to New York City in 84 days as part of a promotional stunt for the newly inaugurated Route 66. Underneath the bizarre facts of Elmer McCurdy’s story lie our national drive to turn everything into a product; the brutal division of people into either successes or suckers; the glamorizing of violence and individualism; the moral bankruptness, aimlessness, hopelessness, aggression, and gullibility behind the cowboy façade. In a smash-up-the-hotel-room drunken rock fest, he sings about how he “killed a man” just for his “big fucking mouth”: “No gun, no knife / Just with these hands I took his life.” Durand is howling with machismo, the band is roaring — and the whole thing is hilariously undermined not only by the fact that Elmer’s story is made-up, but also by the way he chooses to cap off his assertions of bad-assitude.
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