Mudgap Arts
Mudgap has long standing sympathies with the arts. An artists’ and writers’ community may be unexpected in a modern tourist attraction and also a strange successor to the leathery, scrape-knuckle early Mudgap. Nevertheless the muse finds a home among gunfighters’ shadows and voracious visitors in Mudgap’s living ghost town.
Montanña Estatua (sample a few pages above or, if you’re doing a book report, consult the synopsis) is a soon-to-be-published pilgrims’ saga by a lifetime resident of Mudgap using the pseudonym Gregory S Trachta. Yes, yes, everyone in town knows his real name. So be it. After years of dabbling with stories like “Christmas Wrap”, “Shortcut to Illumination”, “Dogma, Yo Soy Dios,” the wary author has quilted a yarn of Mudgap’s passage, his quaintly frangible characters exploring life’s big questions about time, truth, reality and the meaning of it all. Consider it a southwestern symphony of jukebox tunes you could punch up from a red-cushioned, leatherette booth in Marcella Morgan’s Shooting Alley Mexican Café. Enjoy your breakfast while tiny glistening crystals drift onto the windowsill and the eclectic harmonies brighten your palate. You want salsa verde with that? Or pico de gallo? Or grits?
Former resident and author Titus Wright-Smith, with illustrator Joli L’enfant, wrote five famous books about frontier legend, Doc Bohannon. They are today considered more fiction than fact but did much to grow the Bohannon narrative. One of them, recounting Bohannon’s exploits during the Civil War, was made into a movie in the fifties. Its prominence on after-midnight TV resulted in a remake as Kid Glover’s Bloody Missouri, the producers finding the name “Bohannon” unlikely for a gunfighter.
Two sisters, Mrs. Morgan and Mrs. St Ives, wrote a book about the early days of Mudgap schools. It remains one of the most credible sources of information about this period and about Bohannon. A second book dealt directly with the elusive educator but it was never published and only fragments have been found.
Tom LeMaster did illustrations for the original Mudgap newspaper, “The Lodestone Chronicle,” and also oils and watercolors. His work hangs in the Historical Society, local businesses and even some private homes. His painting of the curious statue on Montana Estatua, as if etched in the gold of morning light, hangs in the Historical Society. Native details in the painting bear markings, not of Apaches who were prevalent in the area, but of Pima Indians from Arizona. His work merged the fanciful and the real.
Maude Lownde, a still-active artist, is known for her speculative compositions. Her spooky ability to visualize and capture events she didn’t experience has entered local lore. Her work can be seen at the Historical Society and other tourist spots..
Lydia Lownde, Maude’s cousin, is editing the poetry of her late relative Powel Latch, known as Powder. “I had no idea Uncle Powder was a poet,” she says. “When he died we found verses all over his laptop. They fit together like jigsaw puzzles. I don’t know how many separate poems there are.” Perhaps you’d like to see a few of her favorites.
Main Attraction at Mudgap Opera House (click for bio of playwright Bardwell)
Our amateur thespians, the Bear Hill Players, present several productions each year in the Estatua Opera House. Their name recalls the frontier practice of hosting traveling theatrical groups at what is now the Historical Society on Colina del Oso, bear hill. Their standard repertoire includes King Lear, usually performed on the concrete stage in the Historical Society’s courtyard, an adaptation of Lewis Carroll’s The Hunting of the Snark, an adaptation of Orwell’s 1984 and, since the playwright’s death in 1996, Emerson Stockton Bardwell’s iconic, The American Pilgrim (see above for short Bardwelll bio).
The Bear Hill Players are most noted, and their notoriety is international, for their unique production of Hamlet. Since it's first staging in 1953, it has incorporated a prologue about the death of Yorick, the only production ever to attempt such a thing.
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Emerson Stockton "Skipper" Bardwell (1947-1996)
Mr. Bardwell was born in University Hospital, Staten Island, July 13, 1947 to Clara Bardwell (1929-1993), a typist/keypunch operator, and an unknown father. He majored in English at the College of Staten Island, working as a janitor at nearby Willowbrook State School. One scene in his iconic play, "The American Pilgrim," briefly dramatizes the 1965 visit by Senator Robert Kennedy. Bardwell dropped out of college in 1966 to write while supporting himself with a job at Plant 2 of the Fresh Kills Landfill, whose feral dogs, giant rats, and predatory birds are a constant, unseen threat during most of "Pilgrim."
With the publication and performance of his play, which uses the landfill and Willowbrook as metaphors for mid-century civilization, he moved to Greenwich Village, where he died on April 22, 1996. The cause of death was not disclosed, but has been assumed a terminal disease.
Bardwell's play, with its highly self-referential use of prose and verse, became the founding document in the American Recursive Theater movement of the 70s through the 90s. Since his death a dozen or so self-styled "gurus" have come forward claiming confidant status with "Skipper," as his friends called him. One or two of these have enjoyed brief fame, but most disappeared into college faculties around the country.
His body was cremated and the ashes scattered at Fresh Kill, per his request. A small plaque appears in a park near the site of his childhood home. A biography, "Skipper and Me," an expansion of a PhD dissertation by Chester Alysworth, enjoyed brief popularity.
From time to time people have come forward claiming to be Bardwell's child, two daughters and son as of this writing, but none have been confirmed. He was not married. Bardwell avoided photographs, and, strangely for this age, none have been found.
Mr. Bardwell's legacy is disputed, but, although the Recursive movement has become a campy curiosity of the era, his play is still widely performed, particularly by amateurs and in the areas to which his "disciples" retreated. Savvy undergraduate intellectuals still salt their wise soliloquies with phrases from Eddie Radigan's closing scene, flippantly delivering such lines as, "Opposite ends of a very short stick from the lower branches of the tree of reason," and "Start a small fire while awaiting the dawn." Pilgrim is the only Bardwell work still in print, and it hasn't returned to New York since 2002.