Yellowstone
by Jennifer Barclay
Yellowstone takes place in Wyoming, at the border of Yellowstone National Park, in the summer of 2017. The characters are all working-class, rural, conservative white men—but they’re played by a group of multiethnic women. The tone is kind of a love child between "Cloud 9," "True West" and "Killer Joe."
The play imagines that our current administration is about to open Yellowstone to fracking for the first...
Yellowstone takes place in Wyoming, at the border of Yellowstone National Park, in the summer of 2017. The characters are all working-class, rural, conservative white men—but they’re played by a group of multiethnic women. The tone is kind of a love child between "Cloud 9," "True West" and "Killer Joe."
The play imagines that our current administration is about to open Yellowstone to fracking for the first time, and the downtrodden characters are hungry to cash in their land so they can finally get a piece of their American Dream-- but then two of the actresses playing the Yellowstone men start to go off the rails. The actress playing Jack finds her newly-discovered masculine power to be too enticing to let go, the actress playing Robbie is too enraged to play a white conservative man with any sort of empathy, and the actress playing Ted has to keep the play on track if she’s going to have any chance to open up bipartisan understanding in the audience.
In "Yellowstone," there are two plays happening simultaneously and feeding off of each other. What happens in one reality bleeds into the other until in the end they become indistinguishable, giving us a theatrical lens through which we can view both sides of the national political divide.
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