Bandit story surprises author
By KAREN SHADE, 05/27/2009
John Cruncleton (left) and Sara Wilemon appear in a new play that explores the celebrity of Depression-era bandit Charles "Pretty Boy" Floyd, "One Man's As Good As Another," opening Friday at the Nightingale Theater. Courtesy
Cruncleton on 'Pretty Boy' Floyd play opening
A story about "Pretty Boy" Floyd by Nightingale Theater's John Cruncleton will not be what you think. Nothing he writes ever is.
"No one will know what to think anyway," he said.
If Cruncleton seems ambiguous on the reception "One Man's As Good As Another" will receive when it opens Friday at the Nightingale, the work he's poured into the story of con men, prostitutes, bank tycoons and reporters colliding at a health resort in Hot Springs, Ark., in 1932 whispers that the writer and actor has plenty of creative ambition.
"All I could do was filter all of these details and all of these different story elements through my brain and refract them somehow in a pleasing way," Cruncleton said. "The direct historic representation was a dead end. I think that's why I struggled so long with it."
Had he told a straight drama of how Charles Floyd was born to a Georgia family who moved to northeastern Oklahoma and how he tried to escape the poverty of the Great Depression Dust Bowl by robbing banks and possibly bootlegging, Cruncleton would not have been satisfied.
Instead of getting a chronology of Floyd's defining hours dramatized from research and hearsay, Cruncleton was interested in hooking a single thread of the Cookson Hills outlaw known for his fondness for a ready machine gun. Like Woody Guthrie's song "Pretty Boy Floyd," Cruncleton writes on the fame and myth of the bandit and supposed killer who became both "Public Enemy No. 1" and a Cookson Hills Robin Hood known for destroying bank mortgages during his robberies.
Floyd was killed by FBI agents in Ohio in 1934.
Cruncleton wanted to avoid turning his play into a silly "pot boiler."
"The play — it surprised me," he said. "It's not exactly what I expected. I keep thinking it might be worthwhile to delve further into Pretty Boy because, again, this play's about these characters I invented. I still think there's still more to write about Pretty Boy himself. Maybe I'll do a one-man show in a couple of years."
Cruncleton is co-owner of the Nightingale, a maverick theater frequently bucking the formula of announcing a theater season and then putting up six or seven productions mostly chosen with the audience in mind and staged within a stretch from September to May. Rare is the repeat run of a show from either the theater's "in-house" crew of Cruncleton and company or the Tulsa theater groups that work there (Theatre Club, Actors Company of Tulsa among them).
"One Man's As Good As Another" is different, Cruncleton said, because it's bigger than most of the works produced there. His wife, Sara Cruncleton, directs the piece and Cruncleton plays a part that's as close to a lead as he'll allow in his work. He and Joseph Gomez play two small-time rogues trying to pass themselves off as Floyd and his partner at the resort, encountering easy money plus a lot of trouble in the "farcical" five-act play. That's right — five acts.
"I hope you enjoy it and don't find it too grotesque," Cruncleton said, laughing.
One man's as good as another
When: 8 p.m. Friday-Saturday, June 5-6 and June 12-13
Where: Nightingale Theater, 1416 E. Fourth St.
Tickets: $8 at the door. For more, call 633- 8666.