Dark of the Moon: Gotta Slop Them Hogs
The State Theater,
through February 6
Running Time: 2 hrs, 30 min
So if Othello wasn’t enough of a meditation on the female purity front, here’s the Smoky Mountains version, a weird Hee Haw-y fairy tale about the “witch-boy who tried to be a human and the girl he witched who was untrue.” Loosely based on the folk song “The Ballad of Barbara Allen,” Howard Richardson and William Berney’s script is a fable about Christianity, desire, and gambling with conjurers. Set in, to borrow a line from South Park, a “redneck, white-trash mountain town,” Dark of the Moon follows the odyssey of witch-boy John from witchdom to humanity and back again, guided by his conflicting passions: love for the human Barbara Allen and longing for his flying eagle and moonlit mountain. Filled with long twangy musical numbers, butter-churning, heel-kickin’, lengthy discussions about moonshine and squirrel meat, and more stereotypes than you can shake a stick at, I reckon this here State Theater Company production, directed by producing artistic director Don Toner, might could be purdy gosh-durn ridiculous.
Several terrific actors from the recent productions Desire (Christa Kimlicko Jones), The Collection (Joey Hood), and A Kind of Alaska (Cyndi Williams, David Jones) appear here, and one is filled with a sense that rent really must be too high here in Austin if it reduces truly talented people such as these to delivering lines like this song-intro: “Well, maybe one verse, and then you gotta slop them hogs.” Perhaps the best line, though, comes when the preacher orders Martin Hudgens (Greg Holt), the strongest man in the county, to rape Barbara Allen (Gretchen Kingsley) in church (while the congregation looks on): “Christ died on the cross to take your sin; Martin’s here to help you, just turn to him.” Then, because everything else in the play is rooted in age-old stereotypes, perverse logic, and a fetish for blaming the victim, the “unfaithful” Barbara Allen has to die pleading “I couldn’t help it.” Ugh.
This article appears in January 21 • 2000.