Onstage would be a small table on which sat a neat arrangement of empty Jack Daniel’s bottles, a telephone receiver, plastic sheet protectors, pencils, a stack of quizzes, and a pencil sharpener. It would look like a modern art exhibit. Also onstage would be two chairs, a lectern which doubled as a music stand, and a black acoustic guitar on a stand directly in front of the liquor table.
Throughout the evening I would keep calling it “my one-man show,” much to the TA’s chagrin. When I played and sang certain carefully chosen, sappy country ballads, they would not be fully memorized but require that I read from sheet music for the lyrics and chords. The performances would feel informal as though I were sitting in a living room with the audience, not so much putting on a concert as asking them to study the songs along with me.
Also, an actress playing an ex — an unassuming, silent woman dressed in black but wearing a white veil — would sit knitting in the audience close to the stage. She would knit throughout the entire show. Occasionally I would direct self-damning remarks to her, or get my TA to do it for me.
The result was THE GOLDEN HORSESHOE: A LECTURE ON TRAGEDY. It world premiered on December 9, 2003 at the ‘Live From the Living Room’ performance series held at the Gershwin Hotel in New York City. The original cast included Michael Wiener as the Teaching Assistant, Ellie Hanlon as the ex, and Juliana Trivers on fiddle (I had a fiddle player pop up from behind the bar and accompany me on the climax song, a lonesome bluegrass version of Stevie Nicks’ Edge of Seventeen).
The show was performed again in winter of 2004-05 for six workshop performances at Don’t Tell Mama, a cabaret in the heart of the Broadway theatre district, with Luke Rosen in the role of the Teaching Assistant (a year later Luke appeared in my award-winning short Lady in a Box alongside Sarita Choudhury).
The short-lived show remained an under-the-radar, underground kind of experience, but it wound up getting shot by award-winning documentary filmmaker David Gaynes and is now available on DVD as AN EVENING AT THE GOLDEN HORSESHOE. Two excerpts from February, 2005 are below. Enjoy.
