PicturedDavid Cale
In 2002, David Cale played a country singer named Floyd, aka Studebaker, in Slaughter Rule, a film about high school football.
The movie never made it close to blockbuster status, but Cale took from Slaughter the seeds of the two-person musical opening this week at the Goodman Theatre.
Floyd and Clea Under the Western Sky, book and lyrics by Cale and starring Cale as Floyd, might seem an odd departure for an actor known, awarded and revered for his idiosyncratic solo shows on and Off-Broadway.
But Cale says he's always found an honesty unlike any other in country-western music.
'There are a whole slew of country writers that capture relationships and real people lyrically in a way that no other genre does, at least not for me,' Cale said between rehearsals. 'Woody Nelson, Johnny Cash, Merle Haggard—they resonate. I get real people and real feelings from their songs. Rock doesn't do that for me.'
In Floyd and Clea, Cale plays a washed up country singer who drives ( echoes of Slaughter Rule again ) a Studebaker. Improbably, in the wide-open spaces of Montana, Floyd meets Clea, a young, aspiring vocalist.
As scenes move from motels and diners throughout the west, Floyd and Clea form a redemptive and complex relationship.
But Floyd and Clea, said Cale, didn't start out as the story of a man and a woman. For years, Cale tried to write the musical as the tale of two men.
'Clea started out as a young man, but writing the story for two men I found I just got stuck. I couldn't do it,' he said.
Cale didn't want to write a romance, and romance cropped up every time he tried to write the story of Floyd and a young man.
'That was the problem when Clea was a guy,' he explained. 'I couldn't seem to get it away from the idea of a romance between the two characters. I wanted something very intimate between them, but not something romantic. I wanted something that I think is actually more complicated than romance.'
Once Cale made the younger character into a girl, the writing got a lot easier.
As Floyd and Clea opens, Floyd is a guy who 'feels his life had pretty much come to an end,' Cale said.
That sense of despair and finality changes after Floyd encounters Clea deep in the wide-open lands of Montana.
'I've spent time in Montana—it's such a stirring landscape. Floyd gravitates back there because he's felt a spiritual connection to the land there before. And I thought it would be a fascinating place for these two people to meet up,' Cale said.
The story winds through Clea's rise on the country charts, her songs reaching out from the radio to Floyd as he drifts across the country in his car.
The piece, he added, comes from a place he's familiar with.
'It's extremely emotionally autobiographical,' he said. 'I've been in the kind of relationship that Floyd has with Clea.'
He was on a plane once, Cale said, when a song came through his headphones on the flight's preprogrammed music selections. It was being performed by someone he was very close to, and he knew it was a song about him.
Cale declines to reveal the song or who was singing it.
'That's very personal. It happened, that's enough,' he said.
The music in Floyd and Clea, composed by Cale's Betwixt collaborator Jonathan Krieisberg, is country by way of folk, he added, with tunes that lean more toward intricate arrangements rooted in the music of generations past than of the slam-bang simple twang of pop/country stars dominating airplay today.
In the end, he said, Floyd and Clea resonates with hope.
'This is a story about somebody who has hit bottom, and who turns it around with the help of a friend,' he said.
Floyd and Clea Under the Western Sky runs through May 8 at the Goodman Theatre, 170 N. Dearborn. Tickets are $20 to $30. Call ( 312 ) 443-3800.