Cowboy in action. Photograph by Erwin Evans, via Wikimedia Commons. Public domain.

The other day, I was on the phone with the playwright and actor David Cale, and he told me about filming a movie in Montana, where a cowboy gave him a cowboy hat. He wore it all the time. He wouldn’t take it off, even back in New York. Guys started hitting on him who would never have sniffed around before. Was the hat the germ for his latest monologue, Blue Cowboy? Sort of.

In 2021, Cale was invited to Ketchum, Idaho, for a residency at the house where Ernest Hemingway had lived. When Cale learned that Hemingway had killed himself in the house, in 1961, he felt spooked and bought a plane ticket home. Then these elks appeared at the windows of the house, and Cale stood looking into the eyes of a bull elk. It was a staring contest. And because Cale fell into the eyes of the bull elk, he took it as a sign he should stay. Was the bull elk the germ for the monologue? Sort of.

Ketchum, Idaho, it turned out, is crazy about dogs. It might be the most dog-centric spot in the States. Cale said that if a person is crossing the street with a dog, every car stops to let them pass, and there is no animal shelter in the area that kills a dog. Not ever. Was the dog thing the germ for David’s monologue? Sure, why not.

After he decided to stick around, he biked to town one day—he doesn’t drive. He wanted to see something called “the trailing of the sheep,” a special day when like fifteen thousand sheep are herded from a colder climate on the mountains to warmer areas below, and at this event two cowboys in a car were throwing candy to children. One of the cowboys threw a piece of candy to Cale. It was a Tootsie Roll. Was the Tootsie Roll the germ for the piece? It was.

I can tell you this with confidence because the Tootsie Roll was an expression of love, or sex, or sudden travel to unknown planets, or whatever you want to call the electricity that makes you want to sit down and write. In three weeks, Cale had finished a draft of Blue Cowboy. It was the fastest he’d ever written anything.

Last week, Richard and I drove from Hudson to Brooklyn to see Cale perform the monologue at the Bushwick Starr theater—it’s running there through November 8. The trip was an expression of our love because the traffic tried to kill us with standstills and crawls.

In the piece, a narrator called Andrew—a writer from New York—comes to Ketchum, Idaho, on assignment, and there he meets a ranch hand named Will, who has tossed him a Tootsie Roll from a car window. Andrew falls in love with Will, and Andrew falls in love with Shelley, Will’s Australian shepherd, who is two years old and has blue eyes. As soon as Shelley sees Andrew, she jumps up and puts her paws on his body. The way, in a moment of attraction, we all wish we could if we weren’t people.

The romance between Andrew and Will is slow and fast, dizzying and tender, with a Brokeback Mountain vibe—the movie is referenced when Will says he saw it and liked it. It comes up when Andrew is trying to understand what Will feels about being gay, being in the closet, and living inside a culture of dudes and bros. Will doesn’t know how he feels, and part of the beauty of the story is the space Andrew offers him to come and go without knowing why. Part of the beauty is the space Cale offers the audience is to wonder about love and loneliness as he embodies both men.

Will is a mystery, not only in terms of what he might want for his life and why he spends time with Andrew, but because we see him only through his dialogue and through actions told to us by Andrew. We have only Andrew’s interiority, as he discovers who he is with Will. We have the workings of a mind we fall in love with, because Andrew is pretty much in the business of finding things to love and ways to love them.

In one sequence, Will and Andrew are returning from a reading of cowboy poetry, and Will wants to stop so they can hug. Afterward, he becomes tense. Andrew reports their exchange:

“It’s okay, baby.”

“Did you just call me ‘baby’?”

“Yeah. It was an accident. No, it wasn’t an accident. I called you ‘baby.’ ”

“Never had a guy call me ‘baby.’ ”

“I never called a guy ‘baby’ before. So, now we’re equal.”

As we get closer to Ketchum—“I’m gonna sleep at my place tonight. I need to think about stuff. I’ll come over tomorrow, if that’s good with you. Got the Sunday off.”

In the house on my own, I think, You can’t rescue him. Will’s not one of the wounded wild birds you used to look after as a kid. He’s really tangled up in some shit. You need to back off. As I’m thinking this, a text comes—“You still up? Can I come over?” And twenty minutes later he’s walking in like nothing happened.

The communication between audience and actor isn’t passive in the cozy theater and inside the intimacy of Cale’s performance. Almost immediately, the audience becomes the dog, following the scent of love wherever it drifts. We trust that Cale will guide us without asking us for anything.

On the phone, Cale told me that people come up to him after performances and say, “Have you heard from Will?” He says, “Not yet.” They ask, “How is Shelley doing?” Even Cale’s director, Les Waters, believed the events all happened. They did not. Even when you write about something you lived, writing changes it into the fiction of your ordering and what you keep and leave out. You want to hold an audience? Start in the middle. Fail to arrive. Make the audience hot. Make the audience laugh.

What I want to tell you is how thrilling it is to sit before a master storyteller in real time, in a physical setting, surrounded by other bodies. A man is on a stage, and he’s talking to you directly. He’s telling you a story, and you are on the savanna with your prehuman mates, and you are at a table in Paris, and he’s leaning toward you. He is stirring the molecules in the air, and all of us in the audience feel them at the same time. We are vibrating as a whole that is happier and more alive than the sum of our eccentric routes to getting there.

Laurie Stone is the author of six books, most recently Streaming Now: Postcards from the Thing That Is Happening, which was long-listed for the PEN America Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay. She writes the Notes on Another New Life column for Oldster Magazine, and her Substack is Everything Is Personal.