SmArts

September 28 - October 4, 2015

Year of the Rooster

By Molly Rector

Last weekend I went to Austin, TX, to see a play. I also saw a dear friend, a sculpture garden, and some very famous bats – but the most important thing was the play: Year of the Rooster, by Eric DuFault.

This was significant for me because it’s the first time I’ve ever gone to a play alone. But it was also important because Eric, who lives in New York and was not able to be there, is a close friend of mine. We met in college, when I offered to share my umbrella on a rainy day. Later, by what seemed yet again pure chance, we ended up living in the same apartment. This was the semester Eric began writing plays in earnest: short, comedic sketches that reflected Eric’s love of the heartbreaking and the strange.

Year of the Rooster, which won the Playwrights of New York (PoNY) fellowship in 2014, was absolutely all of those things: hilarious, strange, and totally, gorgeously heartbreaking. This is a play about cockfighting and the people who love it, but it’s also about the roosters themselves. In the play, pathetic small-town slub Gil Pepper (played by Jason Newman) attempts to find some meaning in his life through training a very impressive and perhaps personality-disordered young rooster named Odysseus Rex (played by Jason Liebrecht). This rooster (whose only aim is to fight and destroy the sun) is the only source of hope for poor Gil, who is consistently shot down by everyone in his life from fight organizer Dickie Thimble (played by Kenneth Wayne Bradley), to his manager at McDonalds, 19-year-old Philipa (played by Julia Bauer), and even the mother with whom he lives (played by Lana Dietrich). As the play progresses, Gil’s narrative plays a number of heartstrings: he’s pathetic, then he’s triumphant, then he’s tragic again. I was amazed at how this play managed to force the utterly ridiculous (one of the other roosters, for example, is named Bat Dolphin) into the same pace as such incredible psychological insight. I found myself laughing uncontrollably, while at the same time aching on behalf of Gil.

Of course part of the effectiveness of the play is that the production in Austin by Capital T Theatre Company (directed by Mark Pickell) was incredible. And when I had the privilege of meeting the actors after the show (I happened to be sitting next to someone who knew them), they told me that they felt the same way: that they were already mourning the characters they would no longer be playing.

I love Eric, but I am absolutely without bias when I say that I hope this is a play I get to see again many times in the future.

Molly Rector is a staff writer for the Daily Record. Contact her at molly@dailydata.com.