Hero of the West
When a very drunk Roy talks his younger brother Ray into “playing war” one evening in the alleyway behind the local saloon in tiny Maynard, Texas, he runs into some of the same problems he ran into in Vietnam. Ray, not as dumb as he acts, squirms around, doesn’t play by the rules Roy expects and ends up killing his semiautomatic 2-x-4-plank-bearing brother “dead” before Roy, slithering through imaginary jungle undergrowth, has a chance to draw a bead on his “gook” target.
Roy is the center of playwright James McLure’s darkly funny double one-act that travels under the name “’59 Pink Thunderbird”—the car in question is Roy’s high school hot rod, the defining object of his high school days, when he was the cock of the walk, admired and sought after by his peers, boys and girls alike.
“Laundry and Bourbon” is the first half of “Thunderbird” and populated by Roy’s wife Elizabeth (Eileen Fisher), her best friend Hattie (Floriana Alessandria), and, later, their gossipy, holier-than-thou Baptist nemesis, Amy Lee (Nicole Podell).
Drinking bourbon in the Texas heat, folding laundry and watching reruns of “Let’s Make a Deal,” the women talk about their lives: their children, or lack of them, their husbands, and the quiet disappointments of married life. Behind the women’s conversation is always the figure of the absent Roy, who has gone off on another bender, abandoning Elizabeth to worry and hypothesize about his faithlessness.
Alessandria leads the action of this one-act, which is not altogether convincing in its portrayal of women, small-town American or otherwise. Hattie is a vigorous character—a good-hearted, humorous pragmatist who can enter any moment, no matter how familiar and repetitious, and delight in it. Alessandria’s portrayal has unflagging energy and the most convincing twang, accelerating the momentum in this world of storytelling and little forward movement. Fisher, a bit stiff on opening night, gives her role the necessary wistful dreaminess and presents a thoroughly convincing object of Roy’s love. Podell manages to make the unbearable Amy Lee sympathetic, and thereby makes believable the small town’s enduring web of relationships.
McLure has the small-town Texan male ego of the post-Vietnam era wrapped up, signed and delivered. “Lone Star,” the name of the guys’ favorite beer, is the second half of the play and opens with Roy slumped against the back wall of a saloon, singing “Your cheatin’ heart” to himself in semidarkness. As the play proceeds, Roy reveals his s**t-kicking, beer-guzzling, boot-stomping self in all its despairing glory: high school was his moment and it’s past, its simple victories swept away by a war that ignored the trappings of his manhood and exploited the values of his maleness, exposing them as swagger in the fearful jungle, lifetimes away from the wide, hot expanses of his Texas home.
Roy is saved by his younger brother, who is both his foil and his support. Ray (as Roy says, “our father was a fool … he named me Roy and you Ray”) is the laconic sluggish thinker, whose obtuseness forms a kind of wit—the slow-moving counterpart to Hattie. Both Ted Harvey’s Roy and Ryan O’Neill-Creyton’s Ray are perfectly acted. The men have not only formed their characters completely but also developed chemistry, their bonding as brothers is palpable. Their timing, consequently, exquisite.
Emmanuel Linden-Broner plays Cletis, Amy Lee’s husband and the brothers’ nerdy, loafer- and pocket protector-wearing, Baptist competitor, who ultimately crashes the pink Thunderbird into the only tree for miles around. Linden-Broner plays Cletis as a jittery, eager-to-please worshipper at the temple of Roy’s high school popularity and takes the opportunity to perform some wonderful comic business with a pack of cigarettes and a book of matches.
Each with its unrelenting demands—the government’s deception, Elizabeth’s desire for family, and Cletis’ wayward destruction of the Thunderbird—will force Roy into a life he never imagined, in which he must reform his broken maleness into a new life. Whether he succeeds or not can only be imagined.
An excellent and worthwhile production directed by Jeffrey Bihr and wonderfully acted by a talented cast.
James McLure’s “’59 Pink Thunderbird” continues weekends through May 16 at the Studio Theater on the College of Marin campus. For tickets and information, call (415) 485-9385.
—Jaime Robles
Published in print by the Piedmont Post.
Photo: Elizabeth (Eileen Fisher) and her best friend Hattie (Floriana Alessandria) by Robin Jackson