THE NIGHT HANK WILLIAMS DIED
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The setting is 1952, in the sleepy dump of Stanley, a west Texas backwater that never produced oil and whose soil wore out long ago. Now it can only watch itself die. But Thurmond Stottle, the play’s 27-year-old hero, isn’t going down with the town. A former football star now reduced to a pump jockey, he leads a band called the Stompin’ Cowboys and dreams of becoming the next Hank Williams. Thurmond thrashes out promising ballads on his guitar, sends them to Nashville, and gets no replies. It’s clear he has a bad case of the “do nothins and don’t cares.”
Thurmond hangs out at the rattletrap Sundowner bar, which is run by Gus Gilbert, a grizzled survivor who hates the town but provides Thurmond with a cynical father figure, extending his beer tab and trying to keep him from going wrong. The other force in Thurmond’s shrinking life is his ex-fiancee Nellie Bess Clark, who’s mired in the fashionable but miserable marriage in Galveston that was her attempt to escape. Old feelings flare up when she returns to Stanley, and soon Thurmond and Nellie are the town scandal.
Karin Simonson Kopischke’s costumes are definitely down-home duds, and Becky Flory’s battered barroom is rich with Dixie detritus. But John Narun’s less-than-varied lighting makes little distinction between night and day.
