THE BRONZE BOY, a courageous American play, showcased at "East of Edinburgh" at 59E.59th Street - in Edinburgh Fest! New York City Next?

THE BRONZE BOY by Nancy Hamada, directed by Todd Faulkner. Cast included August Kiss Fegley, Nicole Greevy and Todd Faulkner. The production was showcased in “East of Edinburgh” at 59 E.59th Street, one of 6 plays selected for Edinburgh’s Fringe Festival. The 59th Street venue offered an opportunity to stage shows prior to the festival. It’s an unusual opportunity in the United States. Unlike Britain, there is no National Theater to provide festival opportunities for new plays, let alone venues to showcase them. 

THE BRONZE BOY is a surprisingly funny, nuanced and serious play about America’s love-hate relationship with guns, explored in a road trip. This meandering journey on our highways is a visit to our hidden gun culture. We see headlines in America, telegraphed shots of life and death madness, but rarely stories of our subterranean inheritance. Our relationship to guns is largely ignored in news culture, which emphasizes senselessness over the hidden “sense” of  frontier ethics. 

Romanced on early TV, frontiersmen (women were tangental) were first celebrated in fiction in papers to entertain Eastern readers. Library of America has an eye-opening collection of western classic novels. From the gritty realism of “The Searchers,” which shows the violent early days of the frontier. Far from the army, at the mercy of Indian raiders, death was a searing fact of family life.  In this spellbinding story, facts of Indian viewpoint gradually emerge. 

The odds changed for settlers as there were more of them and army. But as street towns sprung up,  townsmen wanting “law and Order” infringed on the cowboy-frontier ethic. In the open land, a man could make his mark as he liked. Cowboys had a job, aspirations to get a “spread of cattle” and the right to get liquored up and shoot-up a town.  Murderous criminal gangs might risk death, as a matter of employment, but guns were the mark of manhood. In the later story,  “Warlock,” how a man dies is a final poem about his life, written and erased in dust.

Guns were an irreplaceable tool; a man’s alter-ego, the instrument to assert his “manhood” and “character.” The romance of risk and bravado is alive and well on the open-road of license plates from 48 states, collected in the course of THE BRONZE BOY.  But it’s significant two women are driving the car in this play. And their secret mission is a subversive one. For these inheritors of our “Frontier” know not even the lives of children are “sacred.”  Can the wilderness in our souls be reconciled? 

THE BRONZE BOY is more than a mysterious totem. See this play!  Hopefully in the United States some time soon. The playwright, Nancy Hamada has written a brilliant subtle play about the strange and familiar boundaries of the psyche. Todd Faulkner, director and actor knows this territory, shifting from inferences prosaic and mysterious like a second skin. August Kiss Fegley was moving, as a young artist both trying to accept and defy what she did not create. Nicole Greevy was a revelation of the personal nature of our collective fantasies. 

Recommend THE BRONZE BOY