'All the Fame of Lofty Deeds' puts Jon Langford's art and music centerstage
The last living cowboy isn’t going out quietly. He certainly isn’t ready for any retirement home – the long, slow fade envisioned for him by his son-in-law. Instead, there are still pills and booze to be consumed, gasoline and matches to play with, and guns to fire. And there is still music, lots of music, doused in bile, poignance, sarcasm, and memory.
“The last living cowboy” is fictional singer Lofty Deeds, the title character in “All the Fame of Lofty Deeds,” a new play scripted by longtime Chicago music writer Mark Guarino based on the songs and paintings of Jon Langford, the U.K.-born, Chicago-based renaissance man and cofounder of the Mekons and the Waco Brothers. Produced by House Theatre of Chicago, it’s opening this weekend at the Chopin Theatre. But it’s not shaping up as your typical night out at the theater, or your typical “musical” either. Though Langford’s songs are a big part of it, they don’t so much stop the action as inhabit it, just another hallucination in Lofty’s world.
The pacing is dream-like, shifting time and space as the broken down Lofty Deeds (played by Nathan Allen) reflects on his life. He’s an amalgam of hard-living hard-country legends such as Hank Williams Sr., Johnny Cash and Charlie Louvin. He’s originally in a duo with his chaos-courting brother, Lefty Deeds (played by Patrick Martin), who dies young and leaves Lofty with a solo career and a whole lot of guilt. Throughout characters drift through his life and dreams: a talking tumbleweed serves as his conscious, a talking horse mocks him, a girl in a “dollar dress” entrances him, and a five-headed “suit” named “Jeff” sucks the singer into the music business, patronizes him and then discards him.
“When the Mekons signed to A&M [in the late ‘80s],” Langford whispers as he watches the scene play out in rehearsal, “we got called into a meeting with the label, and Tom [band cofounder Tom Greenhalgh] and I were just laughing through the whole thing, the inordinate number of Jeffs who worked there.”
The play’s title is drawn from a 2004 Langford solo album, which Guarino used as a springboard to work in music and art spanning the singer’s entire career.
“I wanted something where sound and music and story would be woven together into this dream world,” Guarino says during a rehearsal break. “Jon is actually turning the theater space into another art project. There are song lyrics painted in the bathroom. As soon as you enter the room, it’s like you walk inside one of his paintings.”
Langford and Guarino began talking about the project two summers ago. The singer’s fascination with the Old West has played out over three decades in albums such as “Fear and Whiskey,” by his U.K. punk band the Mekons, and his detailed paintings, which sometimes double as tombstones for not only departed country legends, but a long-lost set of values. In the play, representations of Langford’s artwork --- Hank Williams riddled St. Sebastian-like with arrows or signing a record deal --- step down from the frame and onto the stage.
“Mark and I talked about a honky-tonk version of [Samuel Beckett’s] ‘Krapp’s Last Tape,’ ” where the lone protagonist relives his past by listening to himself as a younger man, Langford says. The music, much of it performed by an excellent five-piece band assembled for the performances, sends Lofty drifting back to various stages of his career. His tale becomes a window into a broader commentary on America and its values.
“The Mekons had a genuine love of country and western music as done by Hank Williams, Bob Wills, Johnny Cash, but there was also this cryptic reading of what makes up America tied in with that,” Langford says. “As a kid [growing up in Wales] my favorite TV shows were ‘Bonanza’ and ‘The High Chaparall.’ Putting on a cowboy hat and boots, it was like a civilian uniform, a way to be an American.”
“All the Fame of Lofty Deeds” explores what that means, in all its swaggering ambition and self-destructive complexity. It’s a work befitting a singer-songwriter-artist who has spent his adult life merging art, music and politics. “It’s my curse,” Langford says with a laugh. Guarino’s play makes it a highly entertaining and thought-provoking one.
greg@gregkot.com
“All the Fame of Lofty Deeds” (A play by Mark Guarino based on the music and artwork of Jon Langford): Opens Nov. 15 at the Chopin Theatre, 1543 W. Division, $25, $27, $50; chopintheatre.com.