Cowboy Mouth at The SiLo

By FRANCES TILL

Perhaps the best summary of the storyline in Cowboy Mouth comes from a few lines in the stage notes: "Cavale (Anna Hewlett) has kidnapped Slim (Kane Parsons) off the streets with an old .45. She wants to make him into a rock'n'roll star, but they fall in love. We find them after one too many mornings. They're both mean as snakes."

Eventually they display the traits of broken-hearted, transformational, escape-obsessed, dream-drugged and even tender snakes, but it's snakes all around from beginning to end, except for the iconic, 1.8m-tall Lobster Man, the ironic dead crow, some gunplay and a switchblade, that is.

Cowboy Mouth, from the line: "A true hero of our times would be a rock'n'roll Jesus with a cowboy mouth", is a 1971 author collaboration between two high-cult figures of the early modernist tradition, Patti Smith and Sam Shepard.

Self-referential to the point of narcissism, the play was famously written in two days as Smith and Shepard pushed a typewriter back and forth between them.

Less well-known is that in its debut at the American Place Theatre, the authors played the main characters. They were in the early throes of a relationship and Shepard had only weeks before he starred in another of his plays against a character based on Smith but played by his then-wife, O-Lan, with whom he, like Slim, had an infant daughter.

Much of the play is familiar from Smith's music, but the sensibilities of the piece are Shepard's at his jazziest, neatly filtered through director Colin Moy's understanding that there is more to the drama than frenetic, fiercely American, autobiography.

Hewlett and Kane provide deeply informed performances of difficult roles, and Smith fans will be impressed by how well Hewlett nails her voice.

There's some grit missing in the acting, but there is still more than enough traction in Hewlett's voice to raise the small hairs upright.

Kane's musical contributions are strong and his assaults on the drumset give him cred as the musical madman Shepard in early days.