THEATER

No one seems to want to talk about Bradleyville. Not the Dallas News. Not the Times Herald. Here are three worthy and notable additions to the American Theater and all we saw in both papers was the usual plot line review, and of only one of the three plays of the trilogy, at that.

Production of the Bradleyville Trilogy was an important event. Preston Jones and the Dallas Theater Center deserved better-and more-than they got.

Bradleyville, like any important work, is a microcosm. Like the shell you find on the beach, you can hold it in your hands, listen to the deep and mysterious roar inside, taste its sweet and sour salt and sand. But your view is ultimately external; you can only observe. So you draw your own conclusions. And while you may not learn everything there is to know about the ocean through the shell, you certainly are a little wiser than when we started.

The Oldest Living Graduate; The Last Meeting of the White Magnolia; and Lu Ann Hampton Laverty Ober-lander are collectively the Bradleyville Trilogy, loose-knit group of plays bound by locale and recurring characters. There seems to be no pretension to an overall statement, each is an uniquely individual play capable of standing on its own. The characters who appear in more than one play do so with a kind of cohesive understatement which adds local color, a kind of “at home” feeling for the audience, and a sense of placement within the trilogy.

The success of each play individually tends to throw us off the track when analyzing the trilogy as a whole. But this is the key. It is the juxtaposition of the three statements that gives us our overall view. The whole is greater than its parts.

The Oldest Living Graduate

The first of the three. The News stated that “An incompletely defined touch of. . . mysticism beclouds the story line.” Mysticism? No. There’s not a Rosicrucian in the lot. Floyd Kincaid wants to develop a piece of land controlled and treasured by his enfeebled father, Colonel Kincaid. The land is the symbol of that which Floyd so desperately seeks-the love and approval of his father. It’s an old theme, a simple enough one at that, and still a good one.

The main problem of the play involves Mr. Jones’ reluctance to let a scene go once it’s over. Instead of ending cleanly, scenes tend to trickle out with extra dialogue. We are seldom swept along from scene to scene, but are given over to a lagging ebb and flow effect that can be disconcerting and tend to make us lose interest and grow impatient.

The News’ Mr. Neville felt the ending too long. The problem is not a question of length, but rather one of position. The plot builds to a point where the resolution of what will happen with the Colonel’s property is obviously going to be the climax of the script.

The moment when the Colonel offers the land in a gesture of love, and the moment when the son gently refuses it in a similar gesture, is an emotional high point. Unfortunately, the moments occur immediately prior to, and are swept aside by, the Colonel’s dying speech. Instead of building to a heart-wrenching peak, the climax comes before we realize it’s there. The death speech, then, instead of being part of an important build, is-although very well and movingly acted-an unattached anti-climax, a tapering off of an oft-heard filament of an old man’s dream.

In Graduate, Jones has written some marvelous lines. His sense of humor and idiom is keen and biting. The Colonel’s stories of WWI and the trenches are chilling. Floyd and the Colonel’s recountings of old loves and hurts are poignant and haunting. Jones has examined the little actions that shape our lives and humiliate us in our sleep. He has taunted us with what was until we wake grasping at shadows of dreams of a world that will never be again.

The Last Meeting of the Knights of the White Magnolia

Knights is structurally the simplest of the three plays. The action is concurrent with running time. The strength of the work lies in Jones’ refusal to tell us a complete story about any of the characters or about Bradleyville itself-and yet manages to tell us nearly everything. What he has given us is a many-faceted fragment-an hour and thirty-plus minutes-of the lives of these individuals. By the end of the play, what has been left unsaid is as important as the evening’s full-blooded, gutsy, vibrantly funny dialogue.

As good as it is, the play could stand some pruning. Specifically, the final scene with Ramsey Eyes-the “colored” doorman at the Cattleman’s Hotel – has about as much subtlety as brick bats at two paces. The scene is extraneous dramatic baggage and tends to confuse and weaken a message already received. Jones has created some wonderful characters, and his reticence towards letting them go is understandable-and curable. He can afford to be more confident.

It is to Jones’ vast credit that every diversion is reasonable. Very, very little seems contrived as situation follows ridiculous situation. Jones displays a brilliant ability to sustain comedy and build uproarious sequences in a crisp, lively fashion. We never feel we have laughed too much.

In Knights, funny as it is, the underlying theme is one of dream’s ending. The old ways are simply that – old and outmoded. And there is a certain sadness to the passing of even the silliest of dreams. We staked our lives and live on dreams-and the dreams lie dead and dying.

Lu Ann Hampton Laverty

Oberlander

Lu Ann Hampton Laverty Oberlander, if you can remember the name, is the most ambitious of the three scripts. We first see Lu Ann Hampton just prior to graduation from high school. The time is near the end of the Korean War. Lu Ann dreams of-what? Having a good time.

Lu Ann Hampton Laverty is ten years older. Divorced, hard and bitter, life is a day to day matter of getting along. Baby Charmaine, Maude Lowry’s Bon-Ton Beauty Salon and a beer or two at Red Grover’s bar fill her time and make up her life. Having a good time? Not really.

Lu Ann Hampton Laverty Ober-lander is ten years older. Everything has fallen apart. Corky – the man she met in Act II – is dead. Killed in a wreck. Her mother had a stroke and is a vegetable. Her brother is an alcoholic. Her daughter is a monster – a caricature of Lu Ann herself twenty years earlier.

Her old high school boy friend comes to visit. By the time he leaves, she sees it all. And it is and was nothing much. But that’s a virtue, isn’t it? To go on in the face of emptiness? There never was a dream.

The pathos comes not from dying or the ending of things, but in the never-beginning.

In this sense, Lu Ann becomes the most approachable of the works. It presents us with a fear immediate to us all. In Graduate and Knights we are spectators, no matter how moved or amused. In Lu Ann we are participants.

Set in a mythical West Texas town, the plays transcend any regional bounds. They are full of keenly observed, finely written and life-like people, who compare favorably with any characters in American Theater. Some should become well-known.

Randy Moore’s irrascible Colonel Kincaid-a super-role, by the way – repeatedly jerked us from howls to horror to hurt in one of the best performances seen on any Dallas stage for some time.

Jim Crump’s handling of Skip in Lu Ann, was nothing short of brilliant. Sallie Laurie as Lu Ann was strong when opposite a strong performer (as in her scenes with Mr. Crump); weak when opposite a weak performer, (as in the embarrassing sequences with Charles Beachely).

All in all, acting quality was more consistently good than in anything we’ve seen at the Center.

Direction was sparkling. Paul Baker allowed the plays to speak for themselves. He is a master at finding the rhythms of characters and then keeping them distinct, yet integrated into the whole. He pushed scene after scene to its limits, yet never allowed his style to override or change what Jones had written. This is the stuff of which good direction is made.

The Bradleyville plays have brought national acclaim to Preston Jones. In the face of such laurels, there is a danger of leaving well enough alone. Some final polishing is still needed.

But in the main, it is the measureof the Bradleyville Trilogy and Jones’strength as a playwright that wecome to know-in part-the fragments and the shadows and see themmerge, allowing us to understand thedreams common to us all.