Summary
A gritty, rock-and-roll fable about two artists seeking salvation and a “pop prophet” in a disheveled apartment. A raw exploration of fame, love, and the creative impulse.
Saturday, June 28, 2025 at 8:00 PM Jun 28, 2025, 8:00 PM
Adult Film (adultfilm.nyc) continues to be my favorite little secret in the theater scene. This time around they’ve unearthed a lesser-known 1971 shorty by Sam Shepard and Patti Smith—a real play’s play—and stapled a quick basement rock set onto it. Love being home in bed by 10.
This is a two-and-a-half-hander about characters who reached for a dream and fell short. How far short? The play posits that it’s open to interpretation. See, we all have these deeply-ingrained desires to fit one blueprint or another—how exactly are we supposed to know when we’ve fulfilled them?
We have some abstract vision of what it means to be a thing. Other people grade our performance against their own concept of the same. There’s probably a gap in these evaluations; our brains can’t help but make inferences about how large the gap might be, the downstream social dynamics, and how it all changes over time.
The play frames it a bit less navel-gazily. When did Mick Jagger become a rock star? When he started wanting to be one? When he started acting like one? Feeling like one? Does it matter when other people started to see one? Was he always one and just didn’t know it? Or is “rock star” the British coastline, an ideal to be approximated but never reached?
The old aphorism is “fake it ’til you make it”—but sometimes you don’t make it, and what happens next? Curtain rises on a run-down motel room, where our leads, Slim and Cavale, are living. They’re burnouts. Delusional. They shake their fists at not having realized their dreams—at the public’s impossible demand that a rock star behave like a “saint with a cowboy mouth.”
They play with these ideas over the course of a tight hour-and-change, recounting traumatic stories, playing pranks, fighting, fucking, & playing some music. You can waste a lifetime excoriating yourself for falling short, and these two seem like they just might. Their internalized perception of having failed is brought into sharp relief by the periodic appearance of a third character, the Lobster Man.
This is, like, clearly a person in a lobster hood. But as far as our leads are concerned, the Lobster Man seems to be “passing” as the thing he wants to be, or at least close enough that they get the idea. Their powers of scrutiny don’t seem to extend to a case when their egos aren’t on the line. (And yet, in the end, we get a sense that the Lobster Man may himself feel like he falls short.)
The hard-earned wisdom underpinning “Cowboy Mouth” (if, perhaps, belying its principals) is that it’s not worth losing sleep over what you are and what you aren’t. A real rock star doesn’t spend a lot of time getting lost in the sauce about whether they’re a rock star—they do rock star things. If you’re desperate to be Mick Jagger, the only thing you can possibly do is keep putting one foot in front of the other and be the best Mick Jagger you can be.
That last point, I think, is hammered home by the particulars of this production. It happens to be taking place in a basement 30 minutes outside of the biggest and brightest theater district on the planet, and it’s not inconceivable to me that that could be a source of insecurity for someone. But I think the show stands tall on its own merits: well-acted, well-staged, and well worth the price of admission. When I look at these folks, I see unequivocal stars—I only hope they similarly appreciate their own success.