Dig Yerself a “Dead Outlaw”

Here’s a crazy yarn about a crazier yarn!

In 2006, Broadway brilliantine David Yazbek(Dirty Rotten Scoundrels, The Full Monty, Tootsie), having read my book No Applause and learning that I was also a playwright, approached me about a quirky project he wanted to collaborate on about the epically ill-fated Oklahoma outlaw Elmer McCurdy(1880-1911). We met for a few writing sessions to try to sort out a storytelling approach, but seemed to go around in circles, and in frustration I just took the initative and started writing on my own and sent him a few pages. And, well, that cinched it, and the project was as dead as Elmer. It really was Yazbek’s baby, and I’m kind of a lone wolf as an artist and really do have a hard time playing well with others.

But I fell in love with the story, and since Yazbek seemed to drop it (because the other issue was that he was having a problem solving the story, the hero of which was a dead body, after all) I started working on my own fictionalized version which I called Jasper Jaxon. I felt (semi) comfortable doing this, because not only was my version fictionalized, with all of the names changed, but I also pursued an aesthetic approach I had suggested to David but he had rejected, which was to do it in a folk ballad style in the manner of Woody Guthrie. David’s a Broadway guy, who swims in a culture that priveleges musical complexity. And he had thought the folk approach too “literal”. But I’m a downtown guy, and a folk person, and I kind of live for stripped down, poverty row theatre. I’m also much closer culturally to the material (in fact, I later learned that I’m probably related to the hero, there are Tennessee McCurdys in my family tree). So never the twain did meet.

I got quite far along in developing The Ballad of Jasper Jaxon. In 2007 there was a reading by the And How Company at South Oxford Space. In 2011, we presented a complete musical treatment at Dixon Place featuring myself, Josh Hartung, Sarah Engelke, David Gochfeld,et al. Jim Moore took great pix at that event. I listened to the recordings recently and was kind of floored at how good it was. More recently, in 2018, the Axis Company did a private reading of a non-musical alternative version I wrote.

Anyway, I was oddly delighted to open an email yesterday and learn that the Yaz ended up picking the project up again, and the direction he ended up taking appears to have been…a folk opera? I have no reason to be mad. The whole thing, soup to nuts, was his anyway, and nobody owns folk music. And I had unsolved problems in my own version, so I’m only too glad to leave it in a drawer surrounded by mothballs for the duration. But here’s my biographical post on Elmer McCurdy.

I remain a Yazbek fan as well a McCurdy fan, so I’m more than comfortable recommending that you catch Dead Outlaw, which is at the Minetta Lane through April 7. Tickets and info are here.

(Epilogue: Dead Outlaw opened on Broadway in Spring 2005. My review is here)