Bailey Williams's ‘Buffalo Bailey’s Ranch for Gay Horses, Troubled Teen Girls and Other'

If that title didn’t tip you off, there’s a lot to take in. The show, from Brooklyn-based writer, theater artist, agent, and producer Bailey Williams, landed in East Passyunk this weekend at the Whole Shebang, an upstairs studio space off 11th Street.

What even is this?

Buffalo Bailey’s, written by Williams and directed by Derek Smith, premiered last January at New York’s Exponential Festival and took a small tour this August through New York City, Baltimore, and Philly. Williams has been developing it over the last few years, and the original show’s crowdfunding campaign beat its $10,000 goal by a hair.

So what the hell is it? I’ve seen it, but still feel unqualified to tell you. An ensemble cast of five (including Bailey as “Proprietress” of the ranch) features director Derek Smith, choreographer Alex Rodabaugh, sound designer and DJ Andy Kuncl, and Jack Raymond, who plays a singing gay horse named Swiss Cheese. There are a lot of cowboy boots, bolo ties, tasseled and embroidered button-downs, sequined fanny packs, cutoff booty shorts, and zero eyebrows (the cast plasters them away under waxy swaths of flesh-colored makeup).

The show starts by honoring the latter half of its title, enrolling the audience in a hilariously offbeat parody of a timeshare presentation, complete with spangly choreography that is precisely out of sync and deadpan impersonations of timeshare peddlers urging quick deposit of your “U.S. American dollars.” Williams’s interactive opener kicks the show off with a clarion mania that plays well in the small space, her blue-lidded eyes imparting the dread twinge of being stuck in a room with someone who wants to sell you something. But she promises a gift basket if you make it for the whole 90 minutes.

A show of shows?

And yes, it is 90 minutes, during which the narrative shifts and spins out of control. After acquiring her ranch via a subprime mortgage, Bailey presides over an unspecified utopia of “facilities and amenities” for gay horses and drinking, smoking, shoplifting teenage girls. She needs to sell some timeshares to survive, but a luridly evil New York investor, Bear Stearns (Smith), has other plans. He sends his sincere but fatuous lackey, Gay Horse Trojan (Rodabaugh) — pronounced “Tro-jean” with a Francophone lilt — to spy on the ranch.

Bear Stearns plans a hostile buyout for his own gay theme park, sponsored by Radio Shack and Absolut Vodka. A “show of shows” in the Disco Barn is the gay horses’ only hope.

The cast periodically assures us this is, indeed, a timeshare presentation: it's just imbued with a narrative to make us care. Trojan falls in love with the operatic Swiss Cheese (Raymond). There’s some kind of horse goddess and lots of shiny confetti. DJ Andy tricks the whole thing out with a mix of live and digital sound effects and music, including his own guitar. Digital projections (a mashup of crude and creative animations and well-curated stock images and text) interact cleverly with the choreography.

So many questions

But so many questions remain. What’s with the artists’ fixation on wolverines? Why do people who are playing animals always hold their hands like bunnies sniffing the breeze, even when the animals they’re portraying do not bear any resemblance to rabbits? And, most importantly, why was there no gift basket, despite all promises to the contrary?

By the end of the show, Trojan realizes he’s traded one ruthless boss for another. Buffalo Bailey’s dreams of commodifying the ranch don’t differ much from the machinations of Bear Stearns. Williams finally delivers a short speech that feels like the seed the whole show is grasping for: the growing corporate appropriation of queer spaces and culture.

Buffalo Bailey has the music and the moves, a successfully stripped-down yet flamboyant aesthetic, and a committed cast. If we could just divine a more compact and engaging narrative within the show’s time-share conceit, there’s a timely and creative message here about the metastatic throes of capitalism in a marginalized community.