The Indian medicine shows: Two one-act plays [Paperback]

Daniel David Moses' twin one-act plays, together entitled The Indian Medicine Shows, combine the dramatic and the comic to explore themes of desire, gender, belief, and "show biz" presentation in the closing years of the American frontier. Really the third in a series of four plays that revolve around the idea of the "frontier", The Indian Medicine Shows adds to Moses' mythology of Natives, racism, and gender. "Cowboy" and "Indian" have become vulgar stereotypes, just as the American "frontier" has degenerated into a cliché of post-Adamic pastoralism, but Moses has striven to submit the clichéd underpinnings of the Old West to critical revisionism, although the condensed form of his exploration and the marginally parodic dialogue vitiate any profound allegory.

The immensity of the West circumscribes a loneliness that demands love; its "ghostliness" in Moses' work symbolizes the disavowal of the conventional that makes possible tabooed versions of love. The Moon and Dead Indians is set around the porch of a cabin in the foothills of New Mexico in 1878. The "gray sky before dawn", "the last fragment" of a setting moon, and the image of widowed Ma Jones, "pale in her bedclothes as a ghost" (albeit with a Winchester rifle in her hands), establish a virtually gothic wilderness for the soul. Ma has constructed a paranoid fantasy about the "Indian". The sound of hoofbeats and creaking saddles is "the sound of death coming", even though there are no Indians about and it was a coyote rather than an Apache that had scalped her husband in the mountains. Her son, Jon, tries to puncture her fictions, but she clings as tenaciously to them as she professes to be a Christian. So far there is nothing startling about the situation or its characters. Indeed, the play is riddled with clichés about the white man's isolation and his uneasy relationship with the Native. But the entrance of Bill Antrim, Jon's boyhood friend, becomes a dramatic trope. Though he whistles "The Blue Danube" and charms Ma, he is no innocent. He is inordinately fond of his Colt 41 and has caused the death of a man in Lincoln County. Moreover, it was he who had taught Jon to hunt, drink, and fornicate, and it becomes clear that these two have yearned after the same woman of questionable repute. But even here the texture of their interrelationship is more adolescent than adult-until the vibrations of their mutual homoerotic passion are felt.

Their lives have been a drawn-out flirtation, with Billy being the fugitive "killer" and Jon the "virgin" who learns how to be a man both from and despite his friend. It is in the concealed love of the two young men that Moses reveals the first taboo of the old West: the homosexual love of one frontiersman for another. And the isolated setting becomes a fitting context for this homosexual encounter. The sexuality of Jon and Bill is a troubled one. Despite his sexual passion for Bill, Jon would rather dissociate himself from his dangerous friend because of the latter's proclivity for violence. Bill taunts Jon for being "too weak for this world" and immediately caps this by mocking, "You're as weak as my little forty-one." The Freudian sexual implications are significant, and, tormented by his love-hate, Jon attempts self-mutilation by fire. But this only leads to Bill's passionate conviction that "you and I are stuck together like this skin is." The pair are not simply homos on the range. Their desire for each other would make them outcasts from society. Their shared compelling anxiety is that each will not be loved, that each is admired for physical prowess and not for himself, that each is really alone. If the play simply concentrated on this subject, it would be existential without being complicated by a second dramatic thickening. Moses cleverly introduces his key archetype: the emasculated Native who is both scourge and victim, socially and sexually. Jon and Bill had once cruelly persecuted a girlish Indian male, with Bill finally scalping and castrating the youth. To Bill this incident is a tale of boisterous bravado; to Jon it is a frightful dream from which there is no deliverance, and, so, very much like his troubled relationship with Bill. Here we have the nexus of the play: two young frontiersmen alienated from "civilization", with one being the drunk, the bully, the male protector, and the other being the modest boy, protective of his widowed mother, but sorely in need of protection himself; and against these two is set the persecuted Indian, mutilated and defiled to the point where his torture is a form of sadistic ecstasy for at least one of his white tormentors. The underlying terror is in this Indian's howls of pain as well as in Jon's anguished yearning to be freed from Bill. No wonder, then, that in the crucial climax, Ma, after eavesdropping on her son and his secret male lover, attempts to kill Jon before taking her own life. His homosexual nature is unbearable to her. She knows that the real danger is not the Indian but her son's tabooed love for another male. Her discovery is too much of a "killing" secret.

The unregenerate Bill does not appear physically in the second play, Angel of the Medicine Show. Here the setting is a medicine show wagon camped near a creek in New Mexico in the winter of 1890, and through the figures of Sweetheart, Indian Servant, and Male Beloved, Moses develops a violently bruised romance by stirring a complex mixture of guilts. The homosexuality in the first play threatened an essential aspect of American sentimental frontier life: the camaraderie of the poker game and fishing trip. At once gross and delicate, the homoerotic relationship of Jon and Bill destroys the sentimentalist's stubborn belief in a simple frontier relationship which is immune to lust. With buddy-buddiness inverted and soiled in the first play, the second play is coarser or, perhaps, merely frontal and direct in its delineation of a white man's passion for the frontier "bogeyman". The characters are Angela, a performer in the medicine show, who also happens to be the girl referred to in the first play; David Smoke, a young Mohawk who shills for the medicine show; and Jon, who now complicates his life by a passion for the Indian. David Smoke is a wounded victim who has barely escaped a lynching and who has an omnipresent fear of death. Angela is the profane ministering "angel" who first wounds and then nurses him. And Jon is the double invert who has replaced his covert love for Bill with a passion for David.

At the core of this play is a consciousness of a racial and sexual difference that is sufficient provocation for distrust and hatred. In some sense the characters all pay a price for their difference. The Native begins in pain and terror and ends literally with a disappearing act. Angela, who has her own burden of nostalgic yearning for Bill who has vanished from her life, finds a compromise in Jon, whose past has elements of a nightmare.

The psychosexual and metaphorical suggestiveness of Moses' short plays is strengthened by generally lean writing and by expressionistic lighting devices that, of course, need to be seen in performance rather than read as textual cues, but there is a radical vision of a re-interpreted frontier. This is not simply an old West frontier, but one of homoerotic desire that in an earlier era would have made a cowboy blush. Moses takes tonal risks with his material, and his gambles usually pay off, even though they do occasionally leave him open to charges of pushing the boundaries of performance into melodramatic clichés or camp, as when the Mohawk is forced to wear a calico dress and war bonnet and turn himself into a scrambled icon, a minstrel Indian in crossdress. Sometimes, too, the dialogue verges on parody, but it is eminently clear that the comic shading offers respite from symbol-laden seriousness, as well as being an addition to a spectacle of life at once erotic, absurd, and romantic.
Keith Garebian (Books in Canada) -- Books in Canada