Network serves up saga of Jesse and Belle
D6- ARTS/ENTERTAINMENT
THE ANN ARBOR NEWS • THURSDAY. JANUARY 30. 1986
Network serves up saga of Jesse and Belle
By CHRISTOPHER POTTER
NEWS ARTS WRITER
Are you kiddin’? The Old West wasn’t everything Hollywood made it out to be? Not according to David Freeman’s “Jesse and the Bandit Queen,” opening Friday evening at Performance Network - a wild, two-character tug-of-war featuring a Jesse James and Belle Starr as distinctly removed from Tinseltown’s Tyrone Power and Gene Tierney as, well, as one kind of illusion from another.
“Bandit Queen” presents its outlaw protagonists as long-time off-again-on-again lovers - “a fact,” cautions director David Bernstein, “that’s historically problematic at best. There’s sort of an ongoing mythology about that.”
During the course of the show, a middle-aged Jesse and Belle perform constantly to each other, playing pivotal characters in each other’s lives. In the process they evoke the yawning gap between historical fact and romantic fiction — as well as perennial struggles between violence and compassion, male and female, even (literally) horse and rider.
“It’s a very funny show,” says Bernstein. “There’s lots of metaphors for sexuality. Each of them ‘rides’ the other several times during the show, literally.
“What’s interesting,” he adds, “is having two characters of whom people have both a real and a mythological picture. Jesse tells us ‘I’m gonna write my own memoirs!’ He wants to make his mark, set the record straight about his exploits. But is he being truthful, or just trying to say the best things possible? Both roles are deeply colored by others’ impressions of them.”
“Bandit Queen’s” ongoing truth-vs.-illusion game affects the relation of Jesse and Belle to each other, says Bernstein, as well as their relation to the audience. “They play a lot of games with each other, playing out vignettes and scenes from their lives.
“At one point Belle plays Jesse’s first wife, but all Belle knows about her is what she learned from Jesse. It’s the same when Jesse plays Judge Parker, who sent Belle to jail. The play’s about searching for reality, but whether they or anyone else can still find reality after all this time is questionable.”
Though Freeman evokes sympathy for his famed desperadoes -who were once traditionally eulogized as populist heroes - he stops well short of sentimentalizing them, says Bernstein. “It’s certainly not a nostalgia play. (Freeman) doesn’t pull punches by romanticizing Jesse and Belle at all.
“They’re not portrayed as particularly lovable human beings in terms of what they did. But in terms of their stage relationship with each other, there’s definitely tenderness.”
Performance Network veterans Jim Moran and Judith Ottmar will play Jesse and Belle, accompanied (Friday night) by authentic Western ballads (including one allegedly penned by Belle Starr herself) performed by local folksinger Michael Smith. Smith’s songs will also be heard via tape during the rest of “Bandit Queen’s” run.
'Jesse and the Bandit Queen' will be performed Friday and Saturday at 8 p.m., Sunday at 6:30 p.m., Feb. 6-8 at 8 p.m., Feb. 9 at 6:30 p.m., Feb. 13-15 at 8 p.m., and Feb. 16 at 6:30 p.m. at Performance Network, 408 W. Washington St. For ticket information, call 663-0681.
PHOTO • JAMES MORSE
Judith Ottmar plays Belle Starr and Jim Moran plays Jesse James in David Freeman's 'Jesse and the Bandit Queen.'