Programme note
The Holdup
Director’s programme note by Terry Dodd, 2006.
2006 season · Programme note
- Production
- The Holdup
- Director
- Terry Dodd
- Ran
- January 13 – February 18, 2006
The note, as printed
The cowboy of my youth put me very close to tonight’s play in many ways, and if Graham Greene is right that ‘the creative writer perceives his world once and for all in childhood and adolescence,’ then I’m doomed to the landscape of my mother…New Mexico. I was born playing cowboys and Indians and staring at Frederic Remington prints in my relatives’ houses and wondering if what they depicted was true. A stagecoach in hot pursuit by outlaws; several men sitting around a campfire in the middle of the night; a lone cowboy riding into the sunset. Is there any greater myth than The West?
Marsha Norman has brilliantly taken The Myth and condensed it into one night in The Hi-Lo Country. Could this have happened? Sure. Why not? Four lonely souls collide on the Plains one night and by morning four endings become three beginnings. And one of those endings is a very reluctant one. The Outlaw made perfect sense to me. He is riding into the sunset. We all are. He greatly doesn’t understand the world he is growing old into. Do any of us? Are we supposed to?
I will never forget the expression on my mother’s face when I explained to her about a man named 50 Cent. My mother, who was born in New Mexico in 1920 — and that was only eight years into its statehood. The old meets the new. Set within the framework of a Frederic Remington painting, Marsha Norman addresses this question among many others. And The Holdup ends like the morning star on the horizon at dawn. All you need to do is head toward that star.
Why this survives
Programme notes are the most fragile part of any theatre’s record. They are printed in a few hundred copies, handed out at the door and thrown away on the way home; almost nothing survives except where a company happened to put it on a website. The Denver Victorian published five of them, and all five are preserved in this archive.
This one accompanied the regional premiere of a Marsha Norman play in the first week of the theatre’s first full season under new management. It is worth reading alongside the production page, which carries the synopsis, cast and dates as the theatre published them.
This page is part of the production archive of the Denver Victorian Playhouse, a seventy-five-seat theatre in the basement of a northwest Denver house that staged its last performance in 2011. Details here are restored from the theatre’s own records as they were published at the time; press quotations are reproduced with their original attributions and nothing has been added to them.