Remove a man from the superstitions, fears, and silly strictures of society, a lot of old Enlightenment philosophers used to say, and his natural inclination will be toward laws that are rational and tolerant. Then there are the natural laws of Rex and Cody (Michael Crockett and Christopher Savage). Stripped of the trappings of civilization months ago after having swum to a desert island when their rodeo cruise ship exploded, the two cowboys live under Rex’s civil code, which includes a whole plethora of dictums about speech alone. Punishment consists of a day without food, and among the verboten topics are breasts, death threats, beer, food, relationships, faux ship sightings, cannibalism, and Brokeback Mountain. So much is against the law, in fact, that Cody is running out of legal types of conversation in Best Enemies, a sly, haunting, and remarkably fun new existential comedy by area playwright Michael Kimball, smartly directed by Lisa Statholplos at the Players’ Ring .
Part Waiting for Godot, part Lord of the Flies, with dabs of True West and even The Big Lebowski, Best Enemiesis a buddy/enemy play thick with the rugged animosity, absurdism, and primal whimsicality of two very different cowboys forced into insularity together. Cody, a boisterous libertine of a rodeo clown, and Rex, a repressed and bigoted rancher, are an odd couple, and there is little, beyond a stick and a rock, to distract them from each other and themselves. And so, with great human ingenuity, they create rules, wars, affections, histories — they create, that is to say, a culture. Although the play is set on a tiny desert island (very minimally suggested by sun-blanched orange and green brushed over the floor of the bare stage), the real setting of the play is the stranger terrain of the human psyche.
This psychic landscape asserts itself rather forcefully upon the tabula rasa of the desert isle. Onto the desolation, Rex and Cody project a mythical topography — Big Mountain, several miles high — and busily storm up and scramble down the complicated switchback “trail” of the “mountain.” Their ritual mimed climb and descent (hilariously blocked) allows them the terrain they need to dramatize chasing, talking down to, and escaping from each other; respecting the mountain’s dimensions is thus paramount to law-abiding citizenship. One of the cowboys’ recurrent legal trespasses, in fact, has been ingeniously coined a “crime against geography.”
Kimball’s nimble, irreverent, and immensely entertaining script is filled with this sort of quippy treasure, but is also admirably varied. The banter, rage, and primal strangeness of Rex and Cody as they get through the heat of the day is alternately arch, crude, and eerie — Cody mocks Rex for being homophobic but dressing like the Village People cowboy; Rex fiercely asks Cody if he’s ever “watched a gutshot coyote enjoy the hell out of a friend’s intestines;” the two resort deliriously to calls of “Hoo” and “Caw.”
