A cowboy tells his audience at Studio 16 about the changes he made to his family’s hat store. He says he’s branching out after business slowed down — now he’s selling candles, romance novels, and soup. With the smile and earnestness of an old friend inviting you to the fire and handing you a beer, he says, “It's because I got drunk one night and misspelled rhinestone.”
It felt like a balloon in my brain burst when I realized it was a minestrone pun.
The Last Cowboy (Hat Salesman) is a 45-minute, one-man show at the Vancouver Fringe Festival, created by UBC alum, high school teacher, and veteran of the UBC Improv team, An Te Chu. The play follows An Te Chu, a cowboy hat salesman who’s fallen on some tough financial times and is currently at risk of losing the shop’s plot of land. It's about the character's dream of becoming a cowboy and figuring out if it's even realistic in the times we’re in.
(For the sake of convenience, I will refer to the creator as his last name, Chu, and the character as his first name, An Te.)
The set was minimal: a stool, a basket for the handful of props used in the show, and a couple of cowboy hats lined up on the ground. But Chu made it feel like a lived-in space. At one point, he went into the audience and asked if a woman could see the clementine tree “out the window.” She said "yes," and he said, “Okay, it's behind that one.” He was pointing at nothing, talking about something imaginary, yet these little details let me see it.
This type of impromptu audience interaction was a key component of the show. Chu pulled people from the audience onto the stage and integrated them perfectly into his narrative. My favourite instance was when he pulled an anonymous man into his leather-smelling, illusory world to talk about his college buddy Luke. They riffed with each other — which was probably easy for Chu, given his improv background — and “Luke” comforted An Te about love lost with such real affection. It was exhilarating to see how eager and ready the audience was.
This show’s comedy was bursting with calculated goofs and perfect gaffs. The phrases “the only time I see cowboys is Halloween and Pride,” “cowboys don’t support Michael Jackson,” and him saying cowboy hats used to be made out of straw before Trudeau (because they were bad for sea turtles) will be etched into the folds of my brain forever. I think I had somatic satiation from having said "that's so good" after every line by the time the play was over.
Much of the show was performed like a standup act, and Chu had obviously mastered the craft. As An Te, his delivery was methodical. He would construct a phrase with architectural care and wait until we saw the skylight to knock it down in one kick.
His comedy was like a sucker-punch. At one point, he said he wanted to play us a song. He slowly pulled out a water jug, said “Let me tune it,” and proceeded to drink from the bottle until he hit the right note. He set the bottle down, took a deep, artist's breath, and began to lip-synch the synth from Drake’s “Doing It Wrong” on the jug. I think I actually cried.
This show’s comedy was bursting with calculated goofs and perfect gaffs.
A mediocre performer would have made An Te a caricature of a cowboy. He would have been loud, brash, gun-toting, and talking about varmints or gold or something. I would have chuckled, but as a lone-star gentleman myself, I would have gnawed the gristle of bad representation with disdain. Chu is not that mediocre performer.
He spoke in a Bob Ross-style southern lilt: slow, soft-spoken, and dreadfully earnest. He perfected the art of wistfully looking into the middle distance, talking with a low drawl and a twinkle in his eye.
An Te has a heart that completes The Last Cowboy (Hat Salesman) and makes the piece shine. In an interview with Fringe, he said that he made a silly character and wrote a play around it. But he turned it into something so much more. Chu, though sometimes silly as An Te, played him with nuanced and realistic honesty. He expressed real sadness, gentle wistfulness at his love of the Old West, and unfortunate exhilaration at an unfortunately cowboy-less future. I feel like I got to know An Te personally.
I extol production because Chu’s excellent character work is wholly responsible for how much I enjoyed it. If he had been a hair less earnest or a modicum less authentic, this production would have floundered.
At the end of the show, An Te realizes that a cowboy’s dream can’t work. In a surprisingly melancholic ending, An Te becomes a bus driver and drives into the sunset. I wish I could follow him there.
