There’s a scene in TEXAS, near the end of the first act, where the two young protagonists, Calvin Armstrong and Elsie McLean, first begin to understand one another, despite their seemingly at-odds personalities. Homesteader Calvin tells city girl Elsie about the natural beauty of the High Plains region that he is so determined to live off of. He says there’s music in the open air, the stars twinkling in the night sky, the colors of the setting sun. It’s as if in that moment, things finally start to click for the young urbanite.
Something similar happened to Clara Moos, the actress who plays Elsie, the first time she rehearsed the scene in the 1,800-seat Pioneer Amphitheater nestled at the base of the Palo Duro Canyon and set against the backdrop of a 600-foot cliff. As she watched her co-star Grant Galloway perform Calvin’s monologue and listened to the chorus quietly hum the tune of waltz music, she felt what Elsie felt: the magic of the Texas Panhandle.
“It gave me chills,” the recent West Texas A&M University graduate says.
The 59th season of TEXAS opened in Canyon on June 6 and will run through Aug. 9. The annual show, hosted by the Texas Panhandle Heritage Foundation, tells the story of ranchers and farmers settling in Texas during the 1880s.
“If you come to this show and don’t leave feeling proud to be a Texan, then we’ve failed,” artistic director David Yirak says.
Fulfilling that promise comes down to finding a cast up for the challenge. This year’s group of 30 dancers, 18 singers, 10 actors, and seven horse wranglers was selected out of over 1,000 performers who auditioned.
As Yirak puts it, “You got to be kind of tough to live in the Panhandle.” And you’ve certainly got to be tough to put on TEXAS.
The cast performs six nights a week, Tuesdays through Sundays, for more than two months straight. The show goes on even on 100-degree days, in the presence of inclement weather or runaway animals—frogs, roadrunners, and, once, a baby rattlesnake—not unlike the perils faced by the cast’s cowboy counterparts.
“It’s a way to keep the actors and the production team on their feet,” Galloway says.
Preparation for these wild interruptions and all aspects of the production took place over two weeks of daily eight-hour rehearsals. The days were long and busy, but in a “summer camp” kind of way, Moos says, especially because most of the cast lives together in the WTAMU dorms.
During her free time, Moos goes to the gym and runs lines. She gets into character with a curated playlist and by thinking back to childhood viewings of Little House on the Prairie, a show that Moos thinks matches Elsie’s over-the-top, Hallmark-esque personality. And since she’s living, rehearsing, and performing in Canyon, she never has to walk far to step into Elsie’s shoes.
That fundamental connection—the feeling of experiencing the Panhandle—that Moos shares with her character is the same thing that Yirak suggests draws in the show’s 30,000-50,000 annual audience members. It’s the reason he’s served as artistic director for 16 years and not unrelated to the reason that brought the real-life settlers who serve as the play’s source material to Texas—the land.
“There’s something addicting about the canyon,” Yirak says.
That natural backdrop is what has survived despite the many changes to TEXAS since its 1966 opening—despite rewrites and an ever-changing cast, special effects added and taken out, songs written and dances altered. Each year, new generations of actors return to the same site, where casts before them worked and not so far from where the fictional characters they portray would have lived. It’s the site of a story that’s uniquely Texan.
