The Long Hard Body
Like many Stephen King works before it, The Long Walk has been canonized into mainstream legitimacy via the familiar road of a film adaptation. Both novel and movie tell the story of contestants who join in a simple competition: walk at a brisk pace, the last one standing wins. The thrilling dystopian story articulates quickly and cleanly an abstraction of the inevitable end result of free market capitalist: win, or die at the hands of the state in spectacle.
Like many musicals, Hands on a Hard Body is an adaptation, but unlike most it’s from a relatively obscure documentary from the 1990s of the same name. Both the documentary and the play tell the story of contestants who join in a simple competition: hold your hand on a truck, the last one standing wins. Both the fictional characters and their real life inspirations detail why winning the royal blue D21 Nissan Hardbody would be so meaningful to them. There’s a mom struggling to feed her kids, a devout Christian who’s husband was recently laid off, an older man who fell off an oil rig and lost his pension, and Benny, who to the annoyance of all the other contestants, already won one of the previous years’ contests.
The portrayals, be they accurate to their real life inspirations, or imagined extrapolations for the sake of the musical, are harrowing; each character in turn pleads their case, vying for audience approval through song. A long commute, the cost of school, economic downturn, or just loneliness all drive the players and the game forward, with genuine gasps and distraught groans from the crowd as one by one in turn they drop off, their hands falling off their hardbodied lifeline to something better.
In King’s story, the losers are shot in the head when they can’t continue any longer; in the musical, the losers have to keep on living. There’s some joy in the epilogue, however. Two characters find love on the tailgate, Benny starts to get his life together after the death of his son and the subsequent divorce from this wife, one character goes on to win the contest in the future. The dystopia is here, and with it the naked competition, its life or death stakes, and its spectacle, but it hasn’t yet been streamlined enough to remove all joy. Hands on a Hard Body is a reminder that there’s still some light between winning and losing.