When You Comin' Back, Red Ryder? by Mark Medoff

First published: 1974

First produced: 1973, at the Circle Repertory Theatre Company, New York City

Type of plot: Social realism

Time of work: The late 1960’s

Locale: Southern New Mexico

Principal Characters:

• Stephen, a nineteen-year-old night counterman at Foster’s Diner
• Angel, a waitress at the diner
• Lyle, an owner of a gas station
• Clark, the franchise owner of the diner
• Clarisse, a successful concert violinist
• Richard, her husband, a businessman
• Teddy, a Vietnam War veteran and drug smuggler
• Cheryl, Teddy’s twenty-year-old girlfriend

The Play

It is early morning in Foster’s Diner, in New Mexico, when the curtain goes up on When You Comin’ Back, Red Ryder? Two of the protagonists are enacting a daily ritual: Young Stephen Ryder is reading the morning newspaper, picking his teeth, and showing a 1950’s macho attitude as Angel, the chubby waitress, cleans up and tries to engage him in conversation. They are at cross-purposes; she wants him to stay in the dusty outpost, hoping that in time he will recognize her female charms, he wants to get out and make a success of himself in the big world. His distant goal is to be a waiter in a tuxedo and own a Corvette Sting Ray “the color of money.” She quarrels with his insistence on being called “Red,” arguing that it does not make sense since his hair is brown. He insists that “when I was a kid I had red hair.” He identifies with the cowboy hero Red Ryder, with whom he shares a last name. The routine continues as, in turn, Clark, the owner of the franchise, and Lyle, who owns the adjacent gas station and motel, make their entrances, doing and saying their usual things. Lyle is a man in his early sixties. He has a slight disability that forces him to walk with a crutch, and he has designs on the waitress Angel even though she is probably forty years his junior.

Emerging from one of Lyle’s motel rooms to descend on the diner are two symbols of big cities and life in the fast lane, Richard and Clarisse Ethredge. He is a successful businessman, and she is an equally successful concert violinist. She carries a violin case containing a Guarnerius violin. There is an aura about them of self-confidence and success. They settle in to have breakfast and listen to the idle, if somewhat hostile, chatter of the locals.

With the arrival of Teddy and Cheryl, a feeling of unease and danger enters the forlorn and dusty diner. Teddy is a forceful man in his early thirties, dressed in an army fatigue jacket; he switches back and forth between being jocular and quietly threatening. For much of the play, he affects a broad Western accent. Cheryl is pretty, slightly scared, and braless—the last causes some helpless staring by Stephen and Lyle.

The tenor of the action has changed. Where before Teddy’s arrival there was a feeling of constantly shifting focus and lazy morning activity, there is now a decided power center: Teddy. He forces all present to focus their attention on him and, under the guise of jovial horseplay, intrudes brutally into their lives and dreams. He is quick to recognize the tangled tensions of sex and attraction between Angel, Lyle, and Stephen. He also immediately creates a strange rapport, with undercurrents of both threat and mutual attraction, with Clarisse Ethredge. The discrepancy between the nickname Stephen has chosen for himself and the way he looks is not wasted on Teddy. He finds it both hilarious and thought-provoking that Stephen is mired in an image of himself that makes him identify with a defunct cowboy hero. Teddy forces Richard Ethredge to ruminate with him about the demise of their boyhood heroes and the values they stood for.

Teddy and Cheryl have stopped to get gas and to get a new generator for their van. A combination of threat and good old boy jocularity convinces Lyle to procure the generator despite the fact that it is Sunday. Teddy carefully instructs Lyle not to put the generator into the van—he will do it himself. Lyle wants to be helpful, however, and opens the hood of the van only to discover the drugs Teddy is smuggling into the United States from Mexico. Suddenly the atmosphere in the diner changes from being vaguely unpleasant to being actually threatening. Teddy demands money from the Ethredges and reveals that he has stolen their car keys. The first act ends with a showdown between Richard Ethredge and Teddy. Richard refuses to give Teddy money and moves to leave the diner and call the police even as Teddy points a gun at him. Teddy shoots him as the stage goes black.

In the second act, Teddy, having pinpointed the relationships and dreams of the other characters in the first, forces them to face reality. He shows Stephen, in a cruel game of cowboys and horses, that he is a wimp—not the hero he has dreamt himself to be, and he shows Angel that her dream of marrying Stephen is impossible. Her best, and only, hope is Lyle the cripple (the owner of the town’s only color television). He also forces Richard, who was only superficially wounded by the gunshot at the end of act 1, to realize—with Clarisse watching in fascination— that he is not the man he—and she—had imagined him to be. Certainly, he is no match for Teddy. The power relations between the Ethredges at the end of the play have shifted to her advantage. The audience gets the feeling that their marriage is doomed, based on their new insights about each other.

The act is a whirlwind of action as Teddy, his imagination and emotions ignited by the ruminations about Red Ryder and other Western heroes, forces the other characters to participate in his own version of therapy theater: first “the lone rider returns to his girlfriend,” then a steamy dance. Curiously, Teddy himself is perhaps the one who is most affected by the proceedings. He comes face to face with his own dreams and loss of values. As the action escalates he becomes more and more frantic and violent, terrifying the others and driving himself to a point of abject desperation. He steals three hundred dollars from Richard, ties everybody up, and stomps out, leaving a disillusioned group—including Cheryl—behind.

When Clark, the franchisee, arrives and frees the captives, they are no longer the people they were when the audience first met them. Stephen asks Clarisse Ethredge to give him a lift out of town, and she agrees—over the protests of Richard. Lyle is quietly triumphant to see his rival for Angel’s affections disappear, as Angel is set to accept the inevitable: Lyle and his color television.

Dramatic Devices

The dramatic prescription used in When You Comin’ Back, Red Ryder? is common enough in the theater: A group of people’s normal lives and routines are destroyed by an outside catalyst who then forces them to face themselves as they really are. The immediate model for the play is Robert E. Sherwood’s The Petrified Forest (pr., pb. 1935), which is also set in a diner somewhere in middle America; it deals with people who dream and create myths about themselves until the firebomb of a violent criminal on the run drops into their midst, pushing them to sort out reality and myth.

In When You Comin’ Back, Red Ryder?, Medoff establishes a routine reality and a small group of characters whose myths, dreams, and illusions are bared for all to see. Once the audience has familiarized themselves with these characters and perhaps begun to care for them, the playwright introduces a troubled man whose own dreams and illusions are buried and forgotten in the memories of a person he can probably no longer believe he once was. The mixture of the dreaming innocents and the man whose dreams have died proves chemically unstable. Trying to understand where his own dreams and myths died, Teddy forces the other characters to face the schism between myth and reality in their lives.

Medoff also very consciously plays with a dramatic device from the cowboy movie genre, the strong, silent stranger who rides into town and solves all the problems, only to saddle up and ride off again into the sunset having changed everybody’s lives. Not only is the author conscious of this mesh of myth and style, he lets his antihero, Teddy, be conscious of it too. Once he has sized up the situation in the diner and the relationships between the individuals he finds there, Teddy amuses himself by playing his own perverse variation on the theme of “Teddy, the Lone Rider.”

From the moment Teddy enters, there is also a measure of mystery to the play. Is Teddy really dangerous, or is he merely a hick with a sick sense of humor? Richard Ethredge, for one, gambles on the latter and loses. The audience does not know what to make of Teddy until the moment when he pulls out the gun and shoots Richard. He is ambiguous for the duration of the first act, which gives the play a mixture of comedy and serious drama. The first act, particularly, is very humorous and exciting because of Teddy’s vicious and slightly demented humor and his superior intelligence. In the second act, the play increasingly becomes a frightening nightmare for the characters as well as the audience. Teddy loses control, and there is a constant sense that he may, before he leaves, do something really awful.

Critical Context

A recurrent theme in Mark Medoff’s oeuvre is the discrepancy between the heroic and innocent dreams of childhood and adult reality. Besides When You Comin’ Back, Red Ryder?, this same conflict is central to The Kramer (pr. 1972) and, especially, The Majestic Kid (pr. 1965). The device is perhaps most obvious in The Majestic Kid, where Medoff introduces as a character in the play the cowboy hero the Laredo Kid. The Kid can only be seen by the protagonist of the play, Aaron Weiss, who himself throughout the play tries to conform to the macho image of his boyhood heroic projection of himself as the Majestic Kid. The Laredo Kid is a fleshing out of subconscious processes in Aaron’s mind as he faces various situations and challenges. The conflict is that the cowboy heroes and their ideals, if they ever had live models, belong in the 1940’s and 1950’s. In Medoff’s plays, they are like dinosaurs trying to pass as twentieth century animals: They simply do not belong. Aaron is a modern, sensitive man, full of angst and possessing a healthy respect for women. He cannot fill out the heroic shadow of his childhood ideal, nor can he see how this awkward, oversized piece—the cowboy hero—could ever fit into the puzzle of a modern, sleek world.

Another recurrent element in Medoff’s works is the violent outsider who tries to come to grips with a world with which he somehow is about to lose contact. Teddy in When You Comin’ Back, Red Ryder? has counterparts in other Medoff plays such as The Kramer, The Hands of Its Enemy (pr. 1984), The Wager (pr. 1967), and, in a slightly different way, Children of a Lesser God (pr. 1979). The outsider who has no real ties to reality himself, who is adrift in a world whose values he no longer understands, becomes a catalyst for other characters who, to all appearances, are well anchored in a world and reality they do understand. The confrontation always produces sparks and a heightened—although not necessarily happy—perception of reality.

Most of all, Medoff’s plays try to come to grips with a modern world where traditional values and morality are outmoded, where greed, ambition, and egotism are becoming the accepted ideals. Medoff always operates with characters who are encapsulated in a separate universe that they try to make impregnable to attacks from reality. He then confronts his dreamers with people whose dreams have been destroyed and who, in turn, have been destroyed by their loss. The real world lies somewhere in between, in a vacuum between myth and destruction.

Sources for Further Study

Adams, Elizabeth. “Mark Medoff.” In Contemporary Dramatists. 6th ed. Detroit: St. James, 1999.

Erben, Rudolf. “The Western Holdup Play: The Pilgrimage Continues.” Western American Literature, February, 1989, 311-322.

Gladstein, Mimi. “An Interview with Mark Medoff.” Studies in American Drama, 1945-Present, 1993, 61-83.

Gladstein, Mimi. “Mark Medoff.” In Speaking on Stage: Interviews with Contemporary American Playwrights, edited by Philip C. Kolin and Colby Kullman. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1996.

Medoff, Mark. “In Praise of Teachers.” New York Times Magazine, November 9, 1986, 72.

The Nation. Review. November 26, 1973, 572.

The New Yorker. Review. December 17, 1973, 99.

Stasio, Marilyn. “Mark Medoff: At Home on the Range.” New York Times, November 27, 1988, p. H7.