`TEXARKANA WALTZ' lassoes hometown debut before off-Broadway run

That's how the story began in the fall of 1991. Eleven years later, a 20-minute piece of sketch comedy has grown into a two-hour drama that received rave reviews in Los Angeles.

And a former Tulsa boy who now lives in Seattle and describes himself as a "Texan by birth, Okie by disposition" is preparing for his play to have an off-Broadway run in November.

But first, "TEXARKANA WALTZ" will make a stop in Tulsa as part of the Summerstage 2002 play festival at the Tulsa Performing Arts Center.

"I'm thrilled. The audience, in my mind, is in Oklahoma," said Broome, a 1978 Rogers High School graduate who, a dozen years ago, was an artist-in-residence offering theater instruction at Booker T. Washington High School. Among other remembrances from that experience, he cast supermodel-actress Amber Valletta as one of the background characters in a production of "Romeo and Juliet."

He was also at that time creating and performing in sketch comedy with Red Meat Substitutes, a troupe that performed at the Phoenix Theater on Main Street. The "Sad Lament" piece was a swan song of sorts, part of the group's final performance before he and a few other local theater veterans migrated to Seattle in search of a larger theatrical pond.

Broome now works as a media specialist for Microsoft, but during his eight years as a producer for the Seattle PBS station, he was able to work on his semi-autobiographical play extensively, sometimes four hours a day.

The result is a work that Heller Theater director Scott Heberling describes as "part Elizabethan revenge tragedy, part cowboy serial, part real-world drama, a genre-ransacking ride."

It was 23 years ago that Eddie Wickett slit his wife Emma's throat in a fit of violence while their two children, Houston and Dallas, witnessed the event. Now Houston lies blank and speechless in a Vinita mental institution, and Dallas lives out of state, hiding her past from the woman she loves.

Circumstances bring brother and sister together, and they begin an epic journey, in true Western style, to bring understanding and justice to their lives.

Traveling through the past, the present and through imagination, the pair are assisted in their quest by fictitious singing cowboys, ghostly apparitions, fire-and-brimstone preachers and a whole bunch of people named Bob, including Cowboy Bob, Warden Bob and Father Bob.

"It's about a family coming to terms with an act of violence, but it's also a story about violence being handed down from generation to generation, and the children ending a legacy of domestic violence," Broome said. Religious fundamentalism and the myths of the American West also play important roles in the play, he says.

He mentions another Tulsan, actor-director Tim Blake Nelson, and Nelson's well-received independent film "Eye of God," a morality tale about a young Oklahoma girl who marries a born-again ex-convict and finds herself pulled down by his bleak vision of righteousness and retribution.

"Part of what goes on in the world of the play, it's very much taking what I think of as icons from my childhood growing up in Oklahoma and putting them on the stage," Broome said. "And thematically, `Eye of God' has a lot in common with `TEXARKANA WALTZ.' It's spooky.

"In the L.A. production, one of the actors was from Oklahoma, and it was critical to the production because that person was able to translate a lot of what the L.A. actors thought to be simply the product of a wild imagination. The actor was able to confirm that these were people, that if you had grown up poor and in Oklahoma, you would probably recognize them. You know, they're not outside the realm of reality."

The play's "Cowboy Bob" character was influenced in part by Broome's grandfather and in part by his older half-sister's stories of going to the Cain's Ballroom as a young girl. Her family was friendly enough with the swing music star, Broome said, that "she remembers sitting on Bob Wills' lap, and he was making up little songs for her."

"There was an act of violence by my father toward my mother," said Broome, whose parents have both died in the last decade. "He had some kind of psychotic episode that manifested itself in an act of violence. Nobody died. My mother was battered, but clearly not killed, and that's kind of the foundation for the play.

"That act of violence had enormous repercussions for our entire family that really altered the course of our lives. So that's at the heart of the play.

"That I grew up with that was very personal to me, but my job as a dramatist is to make my experience of life dramatic and, as much as possible, universal. So I will take things that happened and twist them into drama, because I think the primary value is in creating an engaging piece of theater. And I'm not beholden to facts or reality. It's about doing what I need to do to make a good play."

Removed from Tulsa for a decade, he misses a few things, like art deco architecture, Woodward Park, bitter cold in the winter, extreme heat in the summer and Goldie's hamburgers.

But he doubts that "TEXARKANA WALTZ" could have ever been produced in New York if he'd stayed in Oklahoma.

"It's extremely hard to make a living doing theater anywhere, especially in Oklahoma, and I've yet to manage it still," he said. "(But) to give you a very tangible result of moving, I don't think my play would have been produced in L.A. if I'd been living in Oklahoma. The connection between Seattle and L.A. was an individual. (The connection) between there and New York was an individual.

"By joining a larger community, I was able to meet people who had the connections. Plays do not get produced in New York -- or anywhere else for that matter -- without connections. Those are just the facts."

Theater