Interludes

THE HANGOVER REPORT – David Cale’s BLUE COWBOY at The Bushwick Starr is storytelling at its finest and should not be missed

• By drediman
• October 25, 2025
• No Comments

This past week over at The Bushwick Starr in Brooklyn, I had the great pleasure of immersing myself in David Cale’s latest solo show Blue Cowboy. Unlike most solo shows, this one wholly sidesteps autobiographical content in favor of purely imaginative storytelling. In fact, Cale’s new work is one of the most seductive pieces of yarn weaving I’ve encountered in a good long while. The plot seems plucked from the Lifetime movie catalog — when a writer from New York reluctantly finds himself in Idaho to develop a screenplay, he encounters a closeted cowboy, with whom he has an emotionally and sexually eye-opening affair.

From the description, Annie Proulx’s short story Brokeback Mountain and the popular movie it inspired will likely come to mind, as it should. On the surface, the premise is well-trodden, even a bit kitschy and lazy. But look more closely, and you’ll encounter an ultimately hopeful portrait of a man who slowly opens himself up to the mysteries and intoxicating possibilities of life. Indeed, it’s a journey that’s both familiar and altogether beguilingly bespoke, with all its endearingly quirky twists and turns, as well as moments of mundanity mixed in with revelations of momentous profundity. The beauty of Blue Cowboy is that it inhabits the very fabric of life. Just like the elusive cowboy at its center, the piece is many things at once — thanks largely to Les Waters’ artful yet unobtrusive direction — both a fairy tale and an extraordinarily realistic account, a love story and a quiet tragedy, a one man show and an expansive world unto itself. To give any more away would be detracting from the experience of basking in the pointed joys, awkwardness, intimacy, and heartache of the tale.

If you’ve seen Cale’s other solo shows Harry Clarke and Sandra — two fictitious solo shows told from their namesake protagonists’ perspectives — you know what you’re in for. But unlike those other two plays, this one is performed by Cale himself, which may be the differentiating factor between those works and this one. In addition to being an exceptionally sensitive and keenly observant writer, Cale is also a superb, skillful actor. His ability to lose himself in the world of his stories and the inhabitants within them — throughout, he embodies a number of characters with disarming empathy without losing his distinctive narrative voice — is nothing short of astonishing. Suffice to say Blue Cowboy is storytelling at its finest and should not be missed.

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED

BLUE COWBOY
Off-Broadway, Play
The Bushwick Starr
1 hour, 20 minutes (without an intermission)
Through November 8