Women Who Act

Cowboys With Questions, Rebecca Tourino Collinsworth’s most recent play, dramatizes a conflict between a cult leader, his harem of women, and a wealthy rancher.  Tourino Collinsworth engages a familiar battle of the sexes here, but her given circumstances come as a relief: these women are smart.  Cowboys With Questions is the fifth play in a tour de force string of plays in the last decade that also explore what women can do when they are fully human.  Tourino Collinsworth’s work ranges widely in subject, setting, and tone—a family clinic that predicts a child’s impact on a marriage; a content single mom confronted with the belated return of her spouse; a midwife who helps a pregnant teen to escape prison (to say nothing of talking her through a self-cervical exam); and two Latin American kids orphaned by war who try to find their father—but the backbone is always a study in what the world would be like if women had more room to move. This is even true of her 2005 play, Quickening, centered on five pregnant women, which she wrote partially out of frustration over the lack of roles for women in professional theater.  In life, as in art, the obstacles to women’s action are legion.  With Cowboys, she has again imagined five killer female roles, and two of the remaining three men wear false eyelashes.  
 
Cowboys, like her other plays, is plotted with discipline, a clean puzzle in which every Chekhovian gun that appears is fired. On top of this, her language is precision-tooled for effect, from the vernacular, to Spanish, to the poetry of the commenting chorus.  Phrases, like guns, appear, and reappear in other hands, multiplying their dramatic power.  An attentive audience is rewarded with many moments of warmth, insight, schadenfreude, and humor.  Here we get a gripping story about sex and drugs, but also food for those who crave beautiful language.  
 
All this is accomplished in 80 minutes; and this cast and production gives and gives, not only with lighting and costumes and sound, but even with an artist that creates theater magic by continuing to flesh out the landscape on stage in real time.  No smoke and mirrors.  Just lots of talented people working hard together.  Only Parley could put up a fisherman’s net on a shoestring.      

Christina Tourino is an Associate Professor of English at the Saint John's University in Saint Joseph, MN, as well as Rebecca Tourino Collinsworth's big sister. She has a Ph.D. from Duke University. Her training and academic areas of interest are Comparative North American and Latin American literatures, American ethnic literatures, feminist theory, and literary theory.