'Shoulder' goes from zero to sixty, breaks down

COURTESY LONG WHARF THEATER The boy-meets-tractor genre finds a new home

About halfway through The Shoulder, Dan Hurlin and Dan Moses Schreier's new musical at the Long Wharf Theater, any fears of a descent into self-parody disappear. Hurlin, a comic actor of enviable range who looks like a thin Don Rickles, runs a toy tractor over the naked body of Doug Marcks, who plays the younger version of a septuagenarian farmer (Allan Keller). Who is making a journey across Iowa by tractor to see his brother. Who has suffered a stroke.

If that seems like a lot to take in, that is in fact all you have to understand for 90 minutes. The plot is not important; neither are the characters, all of whom are caricatures embodied by antique toys and voiced by Hurlin—except for The Older Man and his youthful figuration, The Younger Man. There's something delightful about the avowed desires of this production, the sheer gall it takes to open an epic musical about nothing the same week that David Lynch's movie about the same thing, The Straight Story, hits theaters.

Unfortunately, despite several poignant moments, there is too much of a "been there, done that" sense to this production, which subscribes to the trappings of modernism without considering what they mean. For instance, The Shoulder comes from the school that thinks that setting lyrics to atonal, dissonant music makes anything profound. Occasionally, it works, hypnotizing with its sheer power to capture a memory. Although Schreier's music frequently grates, it also achieves heights of unexpected beauty—as in "Telephone Call," a cascading lament about the seductiveness of nostalgia. Other times, the lyrics are silly in a way that can't be excused by claiming ironic detachment. The first time the farmers echo each other with a chorus of "cancer," "goddamn," in remembering the death of a wife, Emily, it's tragic; the 15th time, it's simply too much.

Rather than simply localized problems, these unintentionally comic moments are indicative of a larger flaw. Hurlin prevented the show from becoming an extended monologue by giving the old farmer a younger version of himself to talk to, but it's still stream-of-consciousness, so we're trapped in one mind all the same. And the mind, at least as constructed here, isn't interesting enough to support a scene, let alone a musical; it's like being stuck on a long car ride with your over-earnest Hoosier grandfather who takes it upon himself to confess his erotic thoughts about your dead grandmother. The Older Man makes bad homilies/jokes: "The shortest distance between two points is a straight line. Gill lives 500 miles away. That's one hell of a straight line." He checks his date book continually. He reads road signs. Even his songs are descriptive rather than interpretive, relating obvious features of the landscape rather than what he thinks about them (a song like "Green" is self-explanatory).

Hurlin has nowhere to go and nothing to say about the old guy, so his goofy Iowa characters take over and the other plot disappears. He's a tremendous mimic, with a keen ability to create quick, wickedly sharp character sketches; I'd say he deserves a one-man show, but I think he already has one. Yet, the fact that the farmer(s) disappear under the sketch comedy is disturbing. Is Hurlin saying that his subject matter simply isn't interesting, or that this man, whose dead wife, diseased brother, and inner sexual desires we've heard confessed is just as viable as the one-note dullards he personifies in the undignified forms of derelict toys? Keller and Marcks give controlled, restrained performances, but have nowhere to go, staring into space while Hurlin steals the show. The farmers are incapable of breaking the fourth wall with him; they simply aren't as self-consciously modern as he is.

The Shoulder proposes the old maxim that the journey is more important than the destination, especially considering whom you bring with you. If only we'd been allowed the privilege, and the romance, of being led by a script that actually realizes the hidden genius of every companion—even people in Iowa.

Back to A&E...