Network veterans romp in 'Jesse'

ARTS /ENTERTAINMENT

Belle Starr (Judith Ottmar), left, cuts it close with Jesse James (Jim Moran) in Performance Network's production of 'Jesse and the Bandit Queen.'
NEWS PHOTO • GUY WARREN
 

Network veterans romp in 'Jesse'

By CHRISTOPHER POTTER

NEWS ARTS WRITER

Speedy as a palomino yet treacherous as a rattlesnake, “Jesse and the Bandit Queen” - which opened last weekend at Performance Network - is a deceptively effortless delight.

Had David Freeman’s complex two-character docudrama been placed in fumbling theatrical hands, this lusty yet delicate play could easily have become a shambles of ham-handed confusion. Fortunately, director David Bernstein and co-stars James Moran and Judith Ottmar, Network veterans all, know precisely what they’re about, elevating Freeman’s multi-layered psychodrama into a sweet mix of riproaring humor and cold-sober nostalgia.

A revisionist Western diced with loopy gestaltist overtones, “Jesse and the Bandit Queen” probes the egos and angst of outlaw immortals Jesse James and Belle Starr viewed from multiple perspectives - as mythological heroes, as jest plain folks, as jest plain folks attempting to become mythological heroes.

For two speedy hours, the play romps over, around and through our protagonists’ felonious lives, playing hard and fast with history all the way, which is precisely Freeman’s point: That our spiritual craving for superheroes and supervillains often obliterates history’s hard and dull facts. Eager participants in such showbiz mythmaking, Jesse and Belle profess to “set things straight” as to how they lived, loved, marauded and ultimately perished (“I’m a hero, a legend,” says Jesse. “It matters how I die.”).

With self-serving pride, the two dramatize - both to each other and to the audience - the major, often overlapping highlights of each’s stormy life, with both playing significant others as well as themselves. We meet the mad and murderous Captain Quantrill, whom young Jesse rode with; Jesse’s whiny wife, Zee; a Police Gazette journalist determined to deify Belle (“It doesn’t matter what you do - only what I say you do”), and the lecherous Judge Parker, who’s willing to chuck Belle’s prison sentence in return for an intimate conference in the judge’s chambers.

Softening this cynical mayhem is a touching, rough-hewn love story - our protagonists tarry awhile, dash off to separate adventures, then inevitably re-unite, if only temporarily. It’s a volcanic relationship at best, and stars Moran and Ottmar play “Queen’s” swaggering sagebrush salaciousness to the hilt - pistols drawn and waving, sometimes riding each other like bucking broncos, alternating knock-down drag-out brawls with tender clinches of devotion. Defying exhaustion, director Bernstein hurls his actors all over “Queen’s” Indian-reservation set in a rite of twangy exuberance that proves sturdier than do “Bandit Queen’s” murky psycho-political underpinnings. But philosophically bogus or not, this show’s a four-star, six-shooter gem.

JESSE AND THE BANDIT QUEEN

Performance Network presents a play by David Freeman.

David Bernstein, director; Libby Howes, assistant director; Paul Epton, lighting design; Ron Kramer and Jack Strubbe, set design; Helen King and Harriet Kozyn, costume design.

Cast Includes James Moran and Judith Ottmar

Performances continue Thursday through Saturday at 8 p.m., Sunday 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 S«.

For ticket information, call 663-0681.