Blogcritics The critical lens on today's culture & entertainment
Back in April, I had the opportunity to review Brokeneck Girls: The Murder Ballad Musical at the 2024 NYC Fringe Festival. I wrote, “the characters bond…in a world dominated by abusive men. Sometimes they must respond in kind, even if that means – well, generating new murder ballads.” Eve Blackwater’s show went on to win NYC Fringe’s “Best Musical” award.
American folk songs, Child Ballads, and originals performed live by Blackwater’s folk-goth trio the Brokeneck Girls energized this magical-realist feminist tall tale rooted in old murder ballads. The band, I wrote, “show[s] off oodles of personality and panache, with strong singing and playing, lovely vocal harmonies, and funny vamping.”
Playwright-bandleader Blackwater spoke with me about the updated version of the show, now at the 2024 Days of the Dead festival.
Murder Ballads Everywhere
The Ballad of the Brokeneck Girls began a few years ago when Eve Blackwater noticed “an alarming trend of songs featuring violence against women” at an open mic. As she recalls, “I think one was a traditional cover, one was an original singer-songwriter-style work, and one was an original rap to a recorded track.” She drily added, “I guess killing women spans all genres, time periods and genders.”
It’s a tradition that has evolved in parallel with the media, she says. “Songs and Broadside Ballads were first, followed by Penny Dreadfuls, tabloids, mystery and suspense novels, nighttime news entertainment like Dateline or Hardcopy, horror movies, true crime documentaries, podcasts, TV shows that are ‘based on a true story,’ and the ever-popular cop shows.”
Not that the playwright condemns this media en masse. Like most of us, she says, “I watch a lot of shows. There’s a reason this genre is so popular!”
The play’s characters are partly rooted in songs the Brokeneck Girls do. Blackwater explains that Lady Arlin, “the unsatisfied wife of a wealthy man, came directly from the character of the same name in the song ‘Matty Groves,'” [but she is] a figure whose balladry prototypes are many, in songs such as “Henry Lee,” “Young Hunting,” and “If I Were a Carpenter.”
The musical’s bartender, Babs, “is the femme fatale of folk songs,” Blackwater says, found in songs like “Lily of the West,” “Whiskey in the Jar,” “Betty and Dupree,” and Babs’ original inspiration, the folk classic “Barbara Allen.”
Cabin Boys and Sheriffs
As for the female sheriff, I observed in my review that the character, while unrealistic for the show’s time and place (vaguely, the American South in the 1890s), was “improbably, wonderfully believable.” As Blackwater notes, “there are several old ballads about women stepping out of traditional gender roles.” She points to songs like “Jackaro,” “The Handsome Cabin Boy,” “The Famous Flower of Serving Men,” and “Sovay/The Female Highwayman.”
Folk ballads and character ideotypes are all very well, but turning them into a show is no easy task. The playwright explained that she began with a batch of songs and the stories behind them. Then she confronted the “fun, thrilling challenge” of “discovering the characters behind the songs” and determining “which songs might belong to which person…and the parts each person played in another’s life. It feels like that should have been hard, but everything naturally fell into place.”
With a plethora of material to work with, she says, “cutting the show down to watchable length was brutal. The final read-through before going into rehearsals was 2.5 hours and I had to get it down to 90 minutes. There were dozens of vignettes about historical murders and the bizarre circumstances surrounding them.” The “Barbara Allen” plotline, for example, had to be cut. “It was really hard to choose which stories to tell.”
Editing down was not the only challenge. “I think the most difficult and personal aspect of this,” Blackwater says, “was the decision to address race and race relations in our history. It was a small part of the original script and I was advised to either take it out completely or make it a significant part of the story. A few people at the first reading told me it made them uncomfortable and it wasn’t the sort of thing they were interested in or wanted to think about.
“The moment I considered removing that part of the story was the moment I knew it needed to be told. It ended up being the right choice!”
The show takes a darkly humorous perspective on the terrible history of femicide. I asked Blackwater how humor helps the story connect with audiences. She responded at length.
Life is a mix of comedy and tragedy every day, and they happen at the same time. I wanted to write a comedy, but real life crept in. I love the thrills and goosebumps of a good TV special about a woman in danger, but I can’t watch one without feeling uncomfortable about the way victimization comes across as glamorous and appealing. As a mixed race women, I would not have been allowed to be in the bar where this play takes place, and I would never be cast in most of the roles.
Hopefully, this is a play that lets every audience member feel included. Hopefully there is something meaningful that resonates with everyone. Black and brown folks can watch this and see places [where] they fit into history but have been whitewashed away.
Several conservative people have come to see the show. I thought it would be the end of our association, but all of them made a point to tell me afterwards that they loved it and agreed with the overall message. I’m really happy that the show brought out everyone’s humanity and helped us find some common ground.
Comedy is how everyone in Brokeneck Girls deals with trauma. Sharing a laugh over horrors is therapeutic for us and many women in our audience have told us that watching it was helpful to them. They left the show feeling less like victims and more like survivors.
The Best Medicine…for Murder?
Comedy served a more down-to-earth purpose too. “If the show wasn’t a comedy,” Blackwater says, “it would have been too painful to write and for the audience to watch. This all came out of entertainment and the band’s love of laughter. We want to give the audience a fun experience and tickle their brains! If they learn something, great. If they don’t, that’s fine too.” Because first of all, she says, “I want folks to have fun! This play began as an extension of [the kind of] macabre fun and laughter the band, Brokeneck Girls, delights in.”
Second, she says, “without any judgment, I want to draw attention to this phenomenon of glamorized violence against women. I want people to observe how it speaks to them – why we enjoy watching it and how we feel about it. I’d like to open the door to thinking about this without any judgment or discomfort. There is a reason this genre is so popular, and there’s nothing inherently wrong with that. But it would be great for all of us to be aware of messages in the content we consume, and consider the influence art can have on real life.”
The show has two more performances. Days of the Dead audiences will see a version of Brokeneck Girls: The Murder Ballad Musical that’s been updated since the Fringe production, with new backstory and character arcs, a new song, and the musicians incorporated into the play “in a more meaningful way.” You can meaningfully incorporate yourself into Brokeneck Girls at one of the two remaining performances, Oct. 31 and Nov. 2, 2024. Visit the show’s website for tickets, and see the whole Days of the Dead 2024 lineup at Frigid New York.
