MEDORA, N.D. — For hundreds of miles out past Fargo, heading west on Interstate 94 through North Dakota, the terrain is gently sloping prairie. The sky is enormous, with nothing to obstruct the view, so if a storm is coming there’s drama in the clouds bearing down. Sunflower fields pop up, vast and Technicolor-yellow like an alternate vision of Oz, and every so often there’s a pump jack, bobbing for oil. But most of the scenery has a lulling sameness.



“Barely even a tree,” said Roger Rettig, a British musician who has spent 13 summers in Medora, a tiny outpost near the Montana line. “Then suddenly in the last — what is it, 10 miles before you get to Medora? Suddenly you gasp. The landscape totally changes, and you’ve got all that erosion and the buttes and canyons. It’s like you’ve jumped a thousand miles in a few yards and gone somewhere entirely different.”

It’s a leap into the American West: the part of the country that feels like a cowboy movie, a place of bison and wild horses, where you may actually see antelope play. These are the Badlands, whose remote and moody geography seems a spectacularly unlikely setting for a long-running stage show, let alone one that attracts an average of nearly 1,200 people each night.