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Outlaw Island
Home to friends in enemies’ skin
By: MEGAN GRUMBLING, THE PORTLAND PHOENIX
10/18/2006

Remove a man from the superstitions, fears, and silly strictures of society, a lot of old Enlightenment philosophers used to say, and his natural inclination will be toward laws that are rational and tolerant. Then there are the natural laws of Rex and Cody (Michael Crockett and Christopher Savage). Stripped of the trappings of civilization months ago after having swum to a desert island when their rodeo cruise ship exploded, the two cowboys live under Rex’s civil code, which includes a whole plethora of dictums about speech alone. Punishment consists of a day without food, and among the verboten topics are breasts, death threats, beer, food, relationships, faux ship sightings, cannibalism, and Brokeback Mountain. So much is against the law, in fact, that Cody is running out of legal types of conversation in Best Enemies, a sly, haunting, and remarkably fun new existential comedy by area playwright Michael Kimball, smartly directed by Lisa Statholplos at the Players’ Ring .

Part Waiting for Godot, part Lord of the Flies, with dabs of True West and even The Big Lebowski, Best Enemiesis a buddy/enemy play thick with the rugged animosity, absurdism, and primal whimsicality of two very different cowboys forced into insularity together. Cody, a boisterous libertine of a rodeo clown, and Rex, a repressed and bigoted rancher, are an odd couple, and there is little, beyond a stick and a rock, to distract them from each other and themselves. And so, with great human ingenuity, they create rules, wars, affections, histories — they create, that is to say, a culture. Although the play is set on a tiny desert island (very minimally suggested by sun-blanched orange and green brushed over the floor of the bare stage), the real setting of the play is the stranger terrain of the human psyche.

This psychic landscape asserts itself rather forcefully upon the tabula rasa of the desert isle. Onto the desolation, Rex and Cody project a mythical topography — Big Mountain, several miles high — and busily storm up and scramble down the complicated switchback "trail" of the "mountain." Their ritual mimed climb and descent (hilariously blocked) allows them the terrain they need to dramatize chasing, talking down to, and escaping from each other; respecting the mountain’s dimensions is thus paramount to law-abiding citizenship. One of the cowboys’ recurrent legal trespasses, in fact, has been ingeniously coined a "crime against geography."
Kimball’s nimble, irreverent, and immensely entertaining script is filled with this sort of quippy treasure, but is also admirably varied. The banter, rage, and primal strangeness of Rex and Cody as they get through the heat of the day is alternately arch, crude, and eerie — Cody mocks Rex for being homophobic but dressing like the Village People cowboy; Rex fiercely asks Cody if he’s ever "watched a gutshot coyote enjoy the hell out of a friend’s intestines;" the two resort deliriously to calls of "Hoo" and "Caw."

These two stranded cowboys are a zany, tongue-in-cheek grab-bag of Western Americana archetypes, satires, and cartoons, but in the hands of Savage and Crockett, they are also affectingly fleshed-out humans full of not just wit and gumption, but palpable knowledge and pain. Savage gives Cody a raucous glee for mischief and yodeling, then turns that same loose sensualism into a knowing, aggressive gaze at the secrets of his foil. As for blunt Rex, Crockett makes a visceral relief of his every infinitesimal yield to humor, to revelation, and to emotion. As the two cowboys break more laws, sentence (and thus starve) each other, war up and down Big Mountain, and build "cathedrals" and "brick whorehouses" for sanctuary, they also get to the bottom of Rex and his taut obsession with rules. Something human, then, is redeemed.

Kimball’s writing cycles Rex and Cody from anger through to something like affection and back again, as exhausting and inevitable as the rotation of the sun, and Crockett and Savage navigate these cycles masterfully, with humor, intelligence, and a fine sense of how fear can cede so quickly to relief. After an energetic fight about laws and the Bible lapses into silence and then a brief monologue about retinal floaters, Cody and Rex nostalgically recall their old days on the island, back before games like "Hide the Stick" were "outlawed."
Remember Stick One?" Cody asks, hearkening back to before laws began their undoing. "Hard to forget," Rex replies agreeably, tension leaching from his usually hard face and momentarily letting the laughter, and the communion, back in.

Copyright © 2006 The Phoenix Media/Communications Group