Meth, Memory, and a Cowboy Hat at Soho Playhouse
You think you know where this is going. A cowboy hat, a meth lab, a prison cell. You don’t.
The downstairs bar at Soho Playhouse is not just the downstairs bar at Soho Playhouse. It is also The Club Huron. At the far end of the room is a small riser where theatre lights hang overhead. The space is arranged with chairs and tables for one-person shows and cabaret acts, and hopefully not, but maybe sometimes, magicians.
I had never been past the gin before the night I checked in to see Lost in Del Valle, a one-man show written by and starring Ned Van Zandt. I have a regional bias that I readily admit and am working to overcome, and it is this: having lived in the Northeast and New York City my entire life, I tend to lose interest the moment I get a whiff of any kind of cowboy situation, anything set in the South, or the possibility of someone ordering a “sweet tea.”
Sure enough, there was a cowboy hat on stage, but I need not have worried. Ned Van Zandt, even though the story begins in the seedy underbelly of a no-budget meth lab, is telling a show business memoir, largely through flashback, from a prison cell where he is being forced to provide both oral pleasure and acting lessons to an incarcerated skinhead with a python in his pants.
The Del Valle in the title is a prison in Texas. Despite having the look and energy of a friend of your dad’s who has come over to return a power tool, Ned Van Zandt has seen some shit. Part of the fun of the play is the stories he has to tell and the famous names in them, so I do not want to delve too deeply. Ned was, in fact, a young actor in the seventies who auditioned for Happy Days. I asked him later if he got the part. He did not. He discovered he was gay, liked drugs, and unfortunately slid down that rabbit hole quickly. The story of Sid and Nancy at the Chelsea Hotel could be a play unto itself. In fact, I could have done with more of that and a few other sections of the play that were fascinating worlds I was not ready to leave.
But Mr. Van Zandt and his adroit director and associate producer, Amir Arison, keep the story moving, showing his descent and run of bad luck that left him uncastable and spending time with a meth-addicted couple in Texas. It is especially touching when we circle back to the tragic Belinda from the first scene, now somehow more lost and pathetic as seen through the eyes of a sober Van Zandt. He brings a stoic honesty and humor that carries no sense of victimhood and preaches no twelve-step lifestyle. Instead, he leaves us with a sense of hope, as well as relief, that he is doing well now and is once again a working actor.
A special shout-out to Mike Moore, who accompanies Van Zandt on electric guitar, and a tip of the hat to whoever decided such a device was necessary. Thumbs down, however, to whoever is responsible for the key art and promotional materials. A grainy picture of a desert road with some guitars and barbed wire does not do justice to this gritty, freaky, uplifting evening. Or maybe that is my regional bias again.
