The 2014 Grand Teton Music Festival is under way, and A Roadkill Opera is being featured in an in-store display at Gifts of The Earth.
During a recent trip to Wyoming, Idaho, Montana, and Yellowstone, If You See Roadkill, Think Opera author Stephan Alexander Parker had a chance to revisit the sites of two of his best-known stories. His first stop was at Nora’s Fish Creek Inn in Wilson, Wyoming, which is the setting for “Loose Lips,” a one-act play in that story collection. Stephan met briefly with Nora Tygum, founder and namesake of the restaurant, and for a bit longer with her daughter and the Inn’s current owner, Kathryn Taylor. He had a chance to tell Kathryn this story:
In October 2000, Stephan was exhibiting his writing for the first time at Art-O-Matic 2000 in Washington DC. Stephan had moved to DC only a few months earlier. Among the items in his exhibit were clipboards holding his one-act plays set in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, including “Loose Lips.”
One of the other participants in Art-O-Matic 2000 introduced himself as Jay Marx. Jay said he had worked for his cousin Nora’s concession stand at the Jackson Hole Rodeo for six summers (before she started the restaurant). He told Stephan that Washington “needs a good dose of the West, real bad.” Not only did Jay suggest that “Loose Lips” get a table reading, he recruited actors and organized the reading on the roof of the old Hechingers Department Store. Meanwhile, the official Art-O-Matic went on inside the building.
That table reading of “Loose Lips” was the first public performance of any of Parker’s writing since 1992’s Roadkill’s Greatest Hits!!!. It gave him the conviction that he needed to write a third play to round out a full night of one-acts (Parker’s one-act play”Two Cases” had received a closed table reading in the tented venue at Teton Village after a performance of Greater Tuna). That third one-act turned into A Roadkill Opera.
Parker’s second visit was to the Silver Dollar Bar at the Wort hotel, which is the setting for A Roadkill Opera. Those who have read the book or listened to the CD (or heard it played live) will recall that A Roadkill Opera tells the true-ish story of the hour before opening night for the Roadkill On A Stick Frozen Foods Theatre Company in its first-ever production on July 4th weekend in 1988. The story largely focuses on the characters and what they are wrestling with: the running order of the show, which sketches stay in, delusions of adequacy, butterflies, and what happens if the show is (or is not) a success. The central dramatic plot point is when the cast learns that the showroom is being torn down.
Exciting news: Sources at the Wort Hotel said in July 2014 that the showroom will be restored in 2015. Wouldn’t it be great to have A Roadkill Opera performed in the same venue that it takes place in?
