Near fine first edition book in very good dust jacket. As one of Seattle’s brave small-to-midsize theaters, Book-It tends to fill out its casts with less-experienced actors, some of whom are clearly out of their depth here.Hardcover. Particularly awkward is a tryst between Sissy and the exuberant Bonanza Jellybean (Hilary Pickles), which is simultaneously too graphic and too chaste: The women are buck naked, but they don’t embrace or fondle like true lovers, perhaps to avoid the appearance of out-and-out pornography. Book-It performs in the 192-seat Center House Theater, where everything is literally in your face - notably the crotches of the cowgirls, who at one point line up pants-free facing the audience. Part of the difficulty is the staging of sex scenes, of which there are many. This production - so intimate you can practically see the tape connecting Sissy’s prosthetic digits to her hands - brings his flights of fancy too close to the ground. Robbins, at his best, is like a musician himself - beguiling you with his voice, plucking the strings of your imagination. Yet, for all of the creativity in the staging and music, Book-It’s “Cowgirls” feels disappointingly earthbound. This honors Robbins’ language, and the book’s many episodes are cleverly linked by pop tunes supplied onstage by cowgirl-singer Jo Miller and fiddler Barbara Lamb. But it wasn’t a political manifesto so much as a poetic cri de coeur, a writer’s expression of the soul’s desire to exist outside the bounds of convention.ĭirector Russ Banham stages the drama in Book-It Rep’s customary page-to-stage style, in which the characters speak not only the dialogue, but many of the narrative passages as well. Written in 1976, “Cowgirls” became a countercultural touchstone of sorts - embracing, as it did, free and homosexual love, drug use and animal rights. They take her on an odyssey of self-discovery that leads to the Rubber Rose Ranch, where she hooks up with a bevy of lesbian cowgirls and a sex-mad hermit-guru named “The Chink” (Wesley Rice).
Over the course of her adventure, Sissy’s thumbs serve as a mode of transportation (via hitchhiking), an object of sexual desire and even a weapon they are her curse and her salvation. “Cowgirls” is essentially a picaresque story revolving around Sissy Hankshaw (Kate Czajkowski), a restless spirit born with unusually large thumbs.
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