The play will air on MPR during Chinati Weekend
On December 23, 1927, a man dressed as Santa Claus walked into the First National Bank of Cisco, Texas, and set off one of the most notorious crimes in Texas history — later resulting in a death by electric chair for one man and Santa’s hanging by an angry mob.
Marfa Public Radio is airing a reading of Red Gap, a play co-written by Will Boone and Randy Kennedy, which tells a story centered around this notorious Texas true-crime event of a 1927 bank robbery.
Multimedia artist Will Boone is currently a 2026 artist in residence at The Chinati Foundation. Randy Kennedy is a journalist and writer who was raised in the Texas Panhandle and worked on the staff of The New York Times for 25 years. He now edits Ursula, an arts focused magazine from Hauser & Wirth.
Editor-in-Chief Rob D’Amico sat down with Boone and Kennedy to discuss their play, the dark side of genealogy and their steadfast fascination with mythologized criminality.
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I’d like to start with the simple stuff, like what’s your connection to Marfa, Randy?
Kennedy: I grew up near Lubbock in a really small town called Plains. And I remember at some point, I wasn’t yet writing about art for The New York Times, but at some point, I knew enough about art to know what Marfa was. During the holidays –– 2000 into 2001 –– I was home visiting my mother, and I said, “Hey, I want to go to this little art town.” We got up at four in the morning and drove to Marfa … and I’ve been going with quite a bit of frequency ever since, for 25 years now. I interviewed Bob Irwin when he did his piece at Chinati, and I’ve done some speaking there. It’s one of my favorite places in the world.
And you, Will?
Boone: I grew up in Houston, so I guess I was in my early 20s, like around 2002, and I had met an artist there named Mark Flood in Houston. Mark had buddies out here who were artists, guys like Jeff Elrod and Rob Weiner, so we came out one time. Since I moved back to Texas about five years ago, I’ve been coming out more often. I guess to tie it into the play, Randy and I were sitting around at Planet Marfa and talking about our families — he was talking about growing up in Lubbock and I was talking about growing up in Houston — but my mom’s family is from Cotulla, Texas. They were cattle ranchers … and we got to talking about the criminal elements of our family, like the dark side of our genealogy, and Randy brought up this story about the Santa Claus robbery.
Kennedy: Yeah, it was weird because there was no criminality in my family at all, but I’m adopted, and when I was in my twenties, I found my biological family on my mother’s side. My grandmother, Jane Thornton, was the family historian and she wrote me a series of letters about everything she knew, and she ended one letter, and she said, “In the next letter, I’m going to tell you about the black sheep of the family.” And she sent me a letter about this robbery.
And I had heard about that robbery when I was a kid; it was as famous in its era — which was the 30s, 40s, 50s — as Bonnie and Clyde. The Santa Claus robbery was such a notorious thing in West and Central Texas history.
Henry Helms, who was my first cousin many times removed, was one of the members of the gang that robbed the bank, and it turned very bloody and he was the guy who killed the sheriff, Bit Bedford, and then they were all caught and he was put to death in the electric chair in 1929. So I was like, “Holy cow,” you know, “I have a real one as far as bad guys in the family.”
Before I get into the play more, tell me about what you wrote in your novel Presidio?
Kennedy: It’s about where I grew up. It’s about Llano Estacado, and it’s kind of about criminality too. It’s about a half-assed car thief who kind of has a nervous breakdown … It was a book that I worked on for about 10 years, and it got a pretty good reception when it came out in 2018.
I think Will and I are both pretty interested in cops and robbers and violence and the under-culture and parts of American society that are not part of the mainstream.
And Will made an incredible film that’s called Sweet Perfume. That’s one of my favorite art movies, it’s incredible. And I think at some point, Will, you said, about the Santa Claus robbery, “I’m interested in doing something with it … I really want to do a piece of theatre.” And I said, “Let’s try it.”
Boone: Yeah, I think the thing that I found really interesting about the idea was — because I’m not a theater guy and and neither is Randy — sort of distilling this narrative into just dialogue, people talking about this robbery and to avoid kind of this action-style shootout kind of thing that would be depicted in the film.
I remember one time Randy and I were talking about when something like this happens, there’s the little old lady that gets interviewed on the news for 30 seconds, but what’s the rest of their life like? Like, how do they continue to talk about this kind of trauma that happens?
There was his heavy archetypal thing where the sheriff gets killed, the patriarch of the town, and then you have Santa Claus being lynched. There’s sort of like this double patricide thing that feels like Greek tragedy or something.
Kennedy: And at the very beginning of the writing, Will said, “What if this thing happens over and over again?” It’s not just one robbery, it’s kind of a ritual slaughter. It’s a cyclical bloodletting, and that really structured it.
It ends up that most of the voices in it, you’re not sure if anybody’s still alive. It’s kind of the voices of ghosts and memories. Some of that came out of thinking about the novel Pedro Páramo by Juan Rulfo. You get about 20 pages into that novel, and you’re like, wait, is everybody dead? Everything that happens in this floats in a kind of a netherworld between the land of the living and the land of the dead, Some of it ended up being a lot funnier than we first thought.
That was going to be my next question, is there dark humor in this?
Boone: It’s definitely funny to us. There was another thing early on that I felt influenced it, and it’s this book called The Violence and the Sacred by this French guy, René Girard, and it’s sort of about the scapegoat ritual — when a trauma happens in a group of people, somebody must be blamed and basically sacrificed in order for everything to go back to normal — and so it’s sort of like, what if that just keeps happening? There’s parts where the guys are playing the bank robbery, and they’re listening to ZZ Top, and one of them’s snorting speed or something like that. So it’s not 1927, it kind of shifts around in time.
Kennedy: And you can’t figure out exactly where it is in time.
How long does it run? When you guys do this on public radio, how’s it gonna work?
Randy: When we timed it on stage — and again, we’re neophytes at theatre — it seemed to be about a 90-minute play without intermission.
Boone: And I think the recording is shorter than that, an hour and some change. There’s a particular character named Frances Blassingame … and when we were in Marfa with Terry and Jo Harvey Allen, immediately we were just like, that’s Jo Harvey. We were writing it with her as our kind of dream person, but also just the inspiration for the character. Rob Weiner hosted a reading at his home in Marfa early on, so it was important for us to circle back and work with Rob and the people that he works with in his theater projects in Marfa.
We’ve been recording a big chunk of the play here at the radio station in off hours with the guy from the liquor store, artists and musicians, just people from Marfa, to, in one way, pay respects to this place but also to bring this into a bigger collaborative thing. We wanted people who I think would understand the story in a different kind of way.
Kennedy: And it also plugs into the history of radio plays. I was listening to Gunsmoke, which was a radio series before it was on television. There’s this great history of radio plays with a narrator, music, sound effects, performances. Which is a rich history and it’s pretty cool to think about. I love the idea of this play, which becomes pretty surreal and David Lynchian in passages, being heard on radios all up and down the Big Bend.
Will, tell me what we can expect from your exhibition at the Chinati Foundation?
Boone: Well, a good chunk of my time I’m spending on the play because I’m editing the whole thing. But I am going to have an open studio as a part of Chinati Weekend, and I’m showing a group of paintings that I’ve been working on here that are not necessarily related to the Red Gap project; they’re kind of inspired by lifetime ranch gates — those gates that you can buy at agricultural supply stores. They’re kind of these minimalist paintings. It’s a different project that I’m working on simultaneously.
So what’s next for y’all? Randy, what are you doing next in life?
Kennedy: I’m the editor-in-chief of an art magazine called Ursula, and I’ve been working on a second novel now for a few years. It’s loosely based on a real historical artist named Martin Ramirez, who was a guy who came from Jalisco in the 1930s and went to the Sacramento Valley and got arrested because he probably had some sort of a psychotic break. And then he was in a mental hospital for the rest of his life; he made some of the greatest artwork of the 20th century, hands down.
And Will, what’s up with you? When does your residency end?
Boone: I’m here through the end of October. I’ve been working on an exhibition that’s gonna open in LA at a gallery called Karma in February. We’re doing this radio play, but I kind of see this project as having different permutations, you know? We’re thinking about putting this onto a record and releasing it. I’ve been doing, over the last four years, tons of drawings of ideas for sets and paintings operating as backdrops and sculptures as props. I hope to have an exhibition in the next couple of years that maybe would be activated by a performance of the play.
Kennedy: If you get a chance, come to the talk on Friday with Nate Freeman from Vanity Fair about the play. We’re gonna have some visuals that show the images and things we were exchanging when we were writing it. It’s going to be an unusual art talk.
Marfa Public Radio is airing a reading of Red Gap on Friday, October 9, at 11 p.m. Locals are invited to gather at the station to listen or tune in on marfapublicradio.org
The Crowley Theatre presents Will Boone and Randy Kennedy in conversation moderated by Nate Freeman on Friday, October 9, at 3:30 p.m. The talk is free and open to all.
— Compiled and edited by Alexis Wolfe
