"Late: A Cowboy Song" by Couch Penny Ensemble

There’s unease in the sweetness. Like eating peach preserves out of the jar, something tastes wrong. But not quite so wrong as to stop eating it, or maybe you can’t figure out what it is that tastes wrong. Maybe it still tastes good.

         Couch Penny Ensemble’s production of “Late, A Cowboy Song”, is like this. Nostalgic, but ominous, like a dramatic reading of a soup recipe, or the television static following a movie re-watched too many times. Homey, but an excess of dozens upon dozens of clocks monitor us with dozens upon dozens of faces. The set is partial, mostly consisting of lamps draped in sheer carnelian fabric, but I swear I could still smell the shag carpeting in the Thorndigger living room. I recognize this studio – the space is a challenge, a load-bearing wooden column at center stage, and scenic designer Wynn Lee not only integrates and distracts from a potential eyesore, but makes it a centerpiece, leans into it. I couldn’t look at this set all say, the clocks and clocks and clocks of the setting lending to the direct discomfort in such a comfortable room. 

         Black box shows are the best ones. But that’s because they’re the hardest ones to pull off. Especially with only three characters, every element of the cast and of the musical band is asked to carry more, and the work to bring the audience out of realism and into their little world becomes greater. Their success becomes greater. Their efforts make colors shine brighter, silences speak louder, patterns return faster. A fly or two lazily swirl from an open window that must exist in their living room somewhere. Maybe Mary has left the screen door open after leaving for a walk. 

         Mary (Rachel Katz) speaks protagonistically with her big eyes and hands in her hair. We see her where she is, we wonder where she needs to be. Not quite fitting. Not quite knowing how to fit. A flower floating in the wind until she is nailed down in birth. Scribbling in my notebook during the show, I wasn’t sure what to feel about her, writing in all caps, SHE’S WEARING PANTS! And SHE HAS VOICES IN HER HEAD TOO! I felt confused in the familiarity I felt with her, but what her changing life tells us is that it isn’t quite so simple – do love, don’t love. Instead, she subverts the question in action – married, yes, but who receives the objects of your affections? And what is a crush… is it like wishing for something one doesn’t have? Can you have a crush on a dream, on something you want? Is pursuing happiness like a crush? Who is a cow, and who is a horse? Why is a cow not as beautiful as a horse? Mary is pixelated, almost, her light flitting and changing colors, and comes into higher and sharper resolution, leading us childishly by the hand, when we had thought she was the child all along.

         Crick (Wyatt DeLair) is uncommonly familiar and sympathetic, for an antagonist – he reminded me of having a soft spot for an ex-boyfriend of a good friend, one doomed from Act I, but far from the lowest creature in a categorical canon. In pre-opening interviews, DeLair reflects on Crick, “I don’t want to call him ‘evil’, because he’s not evil…” and I must double down on this sentiment. Not evil, but an antagonist that makes loving art a bad thing, that makes having a favorite movie a bad thing, that makes waiting up for your wife to come home a bad thing. An extinct species encased in glass, he is content with nothing changing, content with trapping his wife inside the frame of a painting, like a girl in a movie watched over and over again, ever-pristine, never changing, never evolving. Kissing the TV, touching the art he was sworn to keep others from touching. For him, holidays come on the same day every year. He tricks us into thinking the story is about him, about his relationship with Mary, when what we really learn is that he is simply a page, a background explanation to a completely different story.         

“Late, A Cowboy Song” closed last Sunday, so I feel no guilt in divulging the outcomes of the characters in Couch Penny Ensemble’s latest production. When I call Crick “a page, a background explanation”, yes, I am being metaphorical, but I am also being literal. Mary walks off into the sunset with her daughter, Blue, not accompanied by Crick, but with the lady cowboy Red. The entirety of the storyline set in “Late” is chapter zero to the eventual story of Mary and Red (Alexandra Chopson). This is why Red can be so hard to pin down at times – not soft-spoken, but speaks softly – writing down in my notes What was she going to say? whenever the character is interrupted. We will never see chapter one, but in chapter zero, Red is an enigma. As a writer, “enigma” is a textbook cop-out, which roughly translates to, I haven’t figured out this character, but I want to sound smart anyway. To Mary, Red is a symbol of confidence, of independence, of control that she wants in her own life but is too afraid to take. To Crick, Red is an outside villain, a symbol of the audacity to do something unusual. These are just projections, but Red is all of these things – confident, controlled, audacious, unusual. But she only speaks in philosophies and her own principles – what her story is, where she came from, what she wants, we would only ever see in chapter one and beyond...

Chopson says herself, “You don’t have to be the loudest voice in the room to understand the most”, calling Red “a very mysterious figure”. Not just an enigma, I’ll concede, but also a conduit… if Mary is the protagonist, and Crick is the antagonist, then Red is the movement of the plot itself.

         Chopson also mentions how surprised audiences will be, the unexpectation of “all the layers that have been pulled out of something seemingly so simple.”  There is a way to examine the little un-niceties of life, to make a couple in dysfunction comedic rather than tragic, to paint abstractly a train crash in slow motion, at times righting itself back on its rails before falling off again, only to right itself briefly, ever left guessing and never expecting the next movement – and a play like “Late, A Cowboy Song” is that way.

Couch Penny Ensemble is a resident theatre company at Greenhouse Theater Center in Lincoln Park, Chicago, IL. 

This review was sought by Bryce Lederer, Director of “Late, A Cowboy Song”, and Artistic Director of Couch Penny Ensemble. 

Past productions have included “Wolves” (2025), “Project Larry” (2024), and “This Is Our Youth” (2023). The future holds many more.