An evening stroll with ‘The Last Night of Red Barker’

The Catamounts production is a series of stories about one member of the infamous Ma Barker gang

The Ma Barker Gang was one of several criminal enterprises active in the early years of the Great Depression. They popped up around the same time as Pretty Boy Floyd, John Dillinger, Bonnie & Clyde and others around the Midwest who found stealing money more appealing than begging for it.

Ma Barker and her four sons were only active for a few years in the early 1930s, and when she and son Fred were killed in a shootout with FBI agents in 1935, that was the end of it. One of the sons, Lloyd, spent 12 years in Leavenworth before being released and serving in the U.S. Army.

Lloyd, also known as “Red,” is the subject of the latest immersive production from The Catamounts. He ended his days in 1949 in Westminster, Colorado, and there’s a marker on the sidewalk in front of the Grange Hall that briefly tells his story.

That’s the jumping-off point for The Last Night of Red Barker, which uses the hall and the small park behind it as the setting for Red’s life flashing before him as he nears his end. Conceived by Catamounts Artistic Director Amanda Berg Wilson and Colorado playwright Jeffrey Neuman — with the script by Neuman and Wilson directing — the action is comprised of a series of scenes involving Red and others.

Things start off at a Denver saloon where Red, played by Jason Maxwell, worked as a bartender under the owner Charlie Klein (Sam Gilstrap). We’re invited to sit down and have a drink and snack on potato chips before Red leads us out into the park for his reckoning. It’s a fun way to kick things off and Catamounts regular Gilstrap is full of avuncular charm as he and Red serve up glasses of lager, cider and “Blue Dolphin” — which we’re told is water.

Nika Garcia and Jason Maxwell in The Catamounts production of ‘The Last Night of Red Barker’ | Photo: Alex Miller

Round trip

Appearing in the saloon to start the journey is Catrina (Nika Garcia), a guitar-strumming spirit in Day-of-the-Dead makeup and a black dress. It’s a neat take on the ferryman myth, the one who takes you to Hades or wherever, and Garcia is ideal in the role.

Purportedly the most dangerous of Ma’s four sons was Herman, and here he’s played by a lively John Hauser. While we’re ostensibly in 1949, we’re seeing Herman as a ghost of sorts since he was the first of the brothers to meet his own violent death in 1927.

By the time Red settled in the Denver area, he’d already served all those years in prison and thought he’d redeemed himself from his time serving in the Army. Herman tries to convince him to back to the old ways but Red just wants to get back to his lunatic wife.

As we go around the park, we meet one of his former cellmates (Don Randle) and a female prisoner named Marion played by Min Kyung (Cecillia) Kim. It’s not made clear who she is or where we are (or I missed that part somehow), but I read later that Red was a POW camp guard in Michigan as part of his Army service.

Emma Messenger as Ma Barker | Photo: Alex Miller

Finally, we meet Ma Barker herself, played with psycho-verve by Emma Messenger. She’s baking cookies and washing clothes by hand and acting sort of maternally until she pulls something surprising out of the wash bucket.

As the beat-down, remorseful ex-con, Maxwell is utterly convincing. All of the cast members, in fact, fill their roles well. Taken in parts, The Last Night of Red Barker is an interesting anthology of encounters — pieces of a troubled life that tell key parts of his story. What’s missing in Neuman’s script is the connective tissue that would make the experience more than the sum of its parts.

It can be an effective narrative device to tell just enough to allow the audience to piece it together. But here there’s not enough of that to make us feel like we’re in on it. The pacing is also very slow, particularly when we moved from one area to another, exacerbating the feeling that the parts of the puzzle don’t fit convincingly.

As I’ve noted in other reviews of Catamounts productions, you can feel a bit confused about your own place in the piece — where to stand, what to do, where to go next. The players have their script, and it seems that if you’re going to have the audience immersed in the action, you need to give them a bit more to cling to.

Red Barker may not tick every box, but as we endure more oddly warm October days, a couple of hours in a park with a group of great actors is certainly a nice way to spend the day.