Writer: Lee Papa
Director: Alex Stroming
Tammy Wynette’s Stand by Your Man plays shortly before the curtain goes up in Lee Papa’s shortish two-hander-with-songs, Midnight in Nashville. It is an appropriate choice. The song presents hardship and emotional endurance as unavoidable realities of womanhood. These are Papa’s themes, too, in a piece that is heavy on sultry Southern atmosphere but relies on some distinctly unlikely late revelations for its emotional impact.
Marcy Aurora (Biz Lyon) was on her way to becoming the biggest country star in America until she pumped three bullets into her abusive husband, Terence. “Only one of them hit; it just happened to be in the right spot,” she tells her sound engineer, Colleen (Catherine Mieses).
After a 20-year sentence for manslaughter, Marcy is determined to reconnect with her past by recording a new album. But can she leave the shadow of her crime and the impact it had on those she loved? Her voice, 20 years on, is doing her no favours. “I can ‘de-age’ you in post-production,” Colleen assures her caustically. Later she advises Marcy to “let them hear the flaws, what prison did to you… twang things up a little”, which she does wonderfully in a pathos-heavy version of the Kris Kristofferson standard Why Me (Lord).
Not much happens in Midnight in Nashville. Marcy sings a handful of country songs, seemingly for atmosphere, since they do not obviously carry any narrative weight, and muses on her past mistakes and achievements. Colleen comments on the songs and probes Marcy’s recollections with various degrees of sensitivity. “What’s it like to kill a man?” she asks. “Not now, next break,” Marcy replies.
The two vape a while on a break, we get a flashback to Marcy’s earlier life, and an exposition-laden Zoom interview with a journalist in Australia. The late revelation that the women are not entirely unknown to each other comes out of nowhere and raises many questions that remain resolutely unanswered.
Lyon’s Marcy, directed with an eye on atmospheric claustrophobia by Alex Stroming, is tremendous. Bedecked in a blouse festooned with skulls and a figure-hugging, gold-sequinned jacket, the performance delivers just the right level of post-incarceration vulnerability and worn-at-the-edges grit. Her singing occasionally strains against the melody (and why wouldn’t it after 20 years in Folsom Women’s Facility), but the emotional investment and stylistic punch in the tunes are undeniable. Mieses provides an incisive, spiky foil as the brooding, defensive, and occasionally snappy Colleen.
Runs until 4 September 2026
