The Roast of Gram Parsons
Written and Directed by Harmon Leon
Under St. Marks Theater | 94 St Marks Pl, New York, NY 10009
Saturday, November 15, 2025
Ingram Cecil Connor III—forever enshrined in the cultural imagination as Gram Parsons—was less a mere American musician than a kind of wayward apostle of the republic’s dusty backroads and neon-lit honky-tonks. His artistic pilgrimage wound through the International Submarine Band, the Byrds, and, perhaps most fatefully, the anarchic glamour of the Flying Burrito Brothers. With each collaboration he refined, re-forged, and evangelized what he famously christened “Cosmic American Music,” that wondrously unruly fusion of country’s plaintive twang, rhythm and blues’ velvet grind, soul’s devotional ache, folk’s contemplative murmur, and rock’s ecstatic roar. In Parsons’ hands, these disparate traditions didn’t merely coexist—they shimmered, combusted, and transcended, forming a sonic gospel that continues to haunt the American stage like a half-remembered dream.
In The Roast of Gram Parsons, written and directed by Harmon Leon, this deliriously off-kilter, desert-baked fantasia, the creative team seizes upon the already mythic misadventures of Parsons—the patron saint of cosmic Americana—and stretches them into a gloriously unhinged musical fever dream. What begins as a twisted campfire tale of friendship, fatal promises, and catastrophic follow-through quickly blooms into a darkly comic operetta of botched ritual and rock-and-roll ruin.
Here, the saga of Parsons’s 1973 pact with his ever-loyal, ever-hapless tour manager Phil Kaufman becomes a kind of American grotesque: a tequila-drenched covenant sealed under the hallucinatory glow of Joshua Tree’s ancient sky. When Gram dies first, as the fates (and substances) would have it, Kaufman’s attempt to honor their pact spirals into a farcical caper involving a stolen corpse, a borrowed hearse, and the sort of “cremation” that only two half-baked mystics of the alt-country underworld could have imagined.
Fifty-two years ago in one of those macabre yet strangely poetic footnotes that only the American rock-and-roll cosmos could produce, the saga of Gram Parsons took its final, gloriously unhinged turn. After Parsons succumbed to a tragic cocktail of morphine and alcohol, his ever-devoted manager, Kaufman, joined forces with Michael Martin, a former roadie of comparable mythic scruffiness, to enact a pact born of grief, loyalty, and a dash of outlaw theatricality. Under cover of night—and with all the ceremonial finesse of a backstage heist—they liberated Parsons’ body from the bureaucratic limbo of the Los Angeles airport. Spiriting the stolen coffin into the vast, indifferent sprawl of the California desert, they attempted a makeshift cremation befitting Parsons’ own cosmic romanticism in legendary Joshua Tree. The result was equal parts farce, folklore, and devotional act: a ragged elegy performed in open air, flames licking the night sky as though trying to return his restless spirit to the constellations that had always claimed him.
Threaded through Harmon’s hilarious script is Parsons’ own genre-defying music—half-twang, half-stardust—which the production wields like a celestial narrator, crooning commentary on the exquisite absurdity of men who dream cosmically yet act catastrophically. The result is a mordantly funny, dust-flecked requiem for a legend and the spectacular incompetence of those who loved him most. Tim Hassler takes us through about 10 early Parsons classics. “Still Feeling Blue” plants us firmly in Buck Owens’ California sound. “Hearts on Fire” has an essence of Willie Nelson’s early discography before his own “Red Headed Stranger” put him on the map; this is an instance of imitation being the sincerest form of flattery, but who was imitating who? Hassler does beautiful justice to “Hickory Wind,” a song that in various arrangements followed Parsons throughout his career. Hassler is faithful to Parsons’ mood and cadence in “Hot Burrito #1,” a true-to-life breakup song. The songlist drills deep into some of the real painful signature songs, “In My Hour of Darkness” and “A Song for You.”
Harmon shapes classic moments so that things that are said almost flip resonate as sincere character-defining quotes. Delays in production, most often attributed to Parsons’ taste for partying, liquor, and drugs, are summed up in “genius doesn’t run on a schedule.”
The irony of a trust fund baby (Gram’s grandfather owned a third of the citrus groves in Florida) borrowing $5 from his road manager for a six-pack of beer the first day they met was not wasted on Phil. Even in Gram’s death, Phil was always taking his wallet out for something. Not only for the necessary jerry can filled with 5 gallons of high octane fuel, Phil was misdemeanor-fined $708 for the theft and destruction of Gram’s casket. But as he always said, “the mangler gets whatever’s needed done, done.”
Harmon holds nothing back with regard to musicians losing their patience with Parsons, and therefore the direction of the Flying Burrito Brothers, a band who never catapulted to their full potential due to Parsons’ battle with addiction. The song “My Man,” from the Eagles’ 1974 On the Border LP stands not merely as Bernie Leadon’s finest contribution to the Eagles canon, but as one of the band’s most luminously affecting creations, full stop. Written as an elegiac homage to Leadon’s fallen friend and former cosmic Flying Burritos co-conspirator, Parsons, the song carries the tremulous weight of personal grief refracted through the polished harmonies of a band ascending toward superstardom. Leadon himself, in a moment of crystalline candor to Harvard Magazine in 2023, offered the kind of epigram that critics spend lifetimes trying to formulate: “The Eagles commercialized what Gram synthesized.” And indeed, one hears in “My Man” not a mere memorial, but a gentle acknowledgment of lineage—the sense that Parsons’ visionary fusion of country, rock, and celestial yearning carved the very path the Eagles would soon pave with gold. Yet beyond its historical resonance, the song remains a profoundly human tribute: tender, plainspoken, and suffused with the bittersweet dignity of those left behind. Its most indelible line—“We who must remain go on laughing just the same”—lands not as resignation but as a fragile, hard-won philosophy. It is the sound of a friend mourning, remembering, and, in the quietest way, thanking the man who once brought such unruly joy to so many lives.
Parsons’ posthumously released Grievous Angel LP has long had a firm place in Rolling Stone Magazine’s top 500 albums of all time. Recorded mere weeks before his final, irreversible descent into legend, Parsons’ second solo album arrives to us like a posthumous telegram—intimate, aching, and luminously unresolved. Grievous Angel is, in truth, less a solo record than a ravishing two-hander: Emmylou Harris, then still a relative unknown, threads her voice through all but one track with such spectral precision that the album begins to feel like a country-rock La Bohème staged in some cosmic roadhouse.
Long hailed as one of the crowning achievements in Parsons’ already incandescent catalogue, Grievous Angel carries an air of tragic inevitability—its harmonies glowing with the fragile shimmer of an art form on the precipice of reinvention. And reinvent it Parsons did. With its tender duets, dust-kicked arrangements, and the unmistakable ache of two voices discovering the emotional topography of American music anew, Grievous Angel quietly laid the foundation upon which the alt-country vanguard of the early 1990s would build. It is both epitaph and blueprint, a final bow that reverberates like an overture.
In its raucous, unrepentantly irreverent swagger, Harmon’s The Roast of Gram Parsons positions itself as nothing less than a jubilant canonization of a cult demigod—a twang-drenched Dionysus whose influence has always loomed far larger than his mortal fame. The piece revels in Parsons’ art and appetites alike, treating his harmonies and his hedonism with equal theatrical relish, all in the service of a celebration that is as lovingly anarchic as the man’s brief, blazing tenure in the firmament of American music.
Review by Tony Marinelli.
Published by Theatre Beyond Broadway on December 14, 2025. All rights reserved.