After Vietnam, It’s Good to Have a T-Bird

The late James McLure, a playwright who spoke to the Vietnam era’s sense of lost direction and dreams, had a poetic ear for back-porch and back-of-the-bar colloquialisms. His rural Texans drink and talk longingly of the adolescent charisma and rural class attitudes that shaped their relationships and values.

Such gifts – humor and affection laced with understanding of bigotry and ignorance in two and three person scenes — made his one-acts attractive outings for high school and community productions. Two of his short forays explore related characters in Maynard, Texas, in 1978 whose lives intertwine in words – three women trading gossip and shots at a house, three men discussing the past in a beer haze behind a tavern. So it was natural in 1980 to combine them in 1959 Pink Thunderbird  — the first act being the short play known as Laundry and Bourbon (all women) and the closing act Lone Star (all men).

The approach allows the audience to connect the domestic dots and the role of a classic chick magnet car in the characters’ psyches. That, more than any refined polish in the stitching together, explains why In Tandem Theater has taken up the project through May 18 at its cozy Tenth Street Theater, 628 N. 10^th St.

What In Tandem forgot was the complexity of acting chops needed to pull the production up to acceptable professional status.

McLure sets the actors a high performance standard to only use his dialog as a doorway into more revealing interior homes. The throwaway humor imposes on serious actors the need for detailed emotional history and character insight, not high volume and telegraphed generic feelings, such as vacant stares into the countryside and night sky to convey a sense of loss.

The best chuckles in 1959 Pink Thunderbird stem from “ordinary people” pushed into revealing regrets in offhand conversation. What’s hardest for the actors is to resist succumbing to the melodramatic extremes they might think are the end-all of the plotting. It takes considerable acting nuance to keep both one-acts from climaxing in puking by drinkers as the main plot upheavals.

Many in the cast have experience in terms of professional training and practice. In time several may prove more consistent and even versatile. But right now they are simply mimicking classwork. They have to check out more closely how rounded actors invest subtleties and glancing blows to land humanistic truth and poignancy.

While Lindsey L. Gagliano has the right outline for nosy confidante Hattie, she relies way too heavily on vocal pyrotechnics in a part that cries for naturalness and sudden candor. Similarly, Libby Amato stabs too generally at how a deserted wife would handle intruding gossips.

As Roy, the troubled Vietnam vet who should move from drunken honesty to confused genuine pain, Matt Koester seldom varies his manner or tone, which quickly strains our affection for his natural stage magnetism. Rob Maass has some interesting instincts about Roy’s shrewdly dumb brother Ray, but clings to surface reactions.

Experienced company founders Jane and Chris Flieller – she directed the first act, he the other, which is quicker paced – have a reputation for efficiency and devotion to nonprofit theater entrepreneurship, reflected in next season’s eclectic, explorative offerings. But here they did not challenge their cast deeply enough to probe rather than pose.

Dominique Paul Noth served for decades as film and drama critic, later senior editor for features at the Milwaukee Journal. You can find his blogs here.