Andrews – The ACT 2 Players’ last performance of the spring season – Josh Tobiessen’s rollicking 2014 play Lone Star Spirits, held May 10-11 at the Valleytown Cultural Arts Center – was fraught with ghosts of high school and family, meshing the present with the past and future in a tale of both Dickensian proportions and echoing Thomas Wolfe’s idea about never going home again.
The veteran cast’s chemistry flowed from the beginning, along with shots of whiskey, as the small ensemble inhabit the sparse set, designed by Billie Caldwell. All five main characters were rarely together, leading to the feeling of dissonance to encourage the sense of the slowly pervading disintegration of the mid-2000s in almost every small Southern town, which is prescient to Andrews’ own waxes and wanes over the last decade.
With cowboy hats and low-key cool T-shirts sporting Jack Daniels logos along with uptight city-chic designer purses and ponchos, the costumes, designed by Leah Wood, are a testament to the newly chic cowpoke appeal in fashion.
Focusing on young Marley’s return to her small town to introduce her father to her fiancé, Taylor Swain breathes a fresh naiveté straight from her big-city Austin aesthetic to the crumbling store her father still runs in the small west Texas town of her birth.
Marley runs the emotional gamut of being caught up by fealty to her father after her parents’ divorce, which precipitated her move and for moving forward from the ties that bind and threaten to keep her frozen in time.
With Brychan Reynolds as her father, Walter, the pathos of the daddy-daughter relationship turns both comic and tragic as the first act includes much of the back story of what led to their estrangement. We find that the absent mother character, only spoken of, has kept the father’s business going all these years working both as wedge and savior of their relationship.
Reynolds’ performance is one of both a slow-growing grief and a nostalgic hopefulness that his small store can continue in a bad economy. His gathering place relies on its existence as both a town tradition and dwindling core of regulars to keep his store afloat in an ever-progressive world spreading toward the bypasses and interstates that threaten to bring extinction to small cities.
Philip Dekle gives a movingly and appropriately nervous and warmly comedic turn as Marley’s quintessentially hipster fiancé, Ben, with his tagline being “Not to be that guy.” He both becomes “that guy” as he sports his requisite Sculley cap and Dolly Parton T-shirt assessing the accoutrements of Walter’s “vintage” pieces throughout the store while assigning values only Austin’s elite and online purveyors could and would pay for chairs and shelves.
Director Cory Cheeks does double duty as Drew, playing the character with an Urban Cowboy bravura sensibility. The Al Bundy-esque character frequently references his winning of the state championship football game as he tries to rekindle romantic sparks with Marley whilst keeping those fires burning with local nurse Jessica.
Rounding out the small cast is Sarah Reynolds as Jessica, the hard-drinking single mother, war widow and nurse, one of Marley’s former classmates and rival for Drew’s affections.
The mysterious Henry Whitman, played as a shadow figure in the last scene by local legend “Fuzzy,” is the “ghost” that resides within and provides overwatch for the town’s only store standing. He is felt as an omnipresent entity throughout the production, with his photograph and hat which hang by the cash register next to various toasts and shots of liquor taken to invocations of the retelling of his infamous grappling with a bear – only to find out he did indeed perish during his showdown with the creature.
Swain’s Marley acts as mediator of sorts as she sifts through all of her hometown relationships. Her at-first tense interactions with Reynolds’ Jessica begin to soften as she realizes what life has been like in the town she left for brighter horizons.
The women sort through Jessica’s widowhood first, as she relates to Marley what it was like to lose her husband in Afghanistan, reminding Marley that she didn’t even send her a sympathy card. The play turns on Marley realizing her disconnect from her past when she sifts through the memories of her brief romance with Drew and her newly forged pre-marital status with Ben.
The men of the play swagger and sway with Southern drawls navigating the sparse set with guns blazing, quite literally.
Cheeks and Dekle deftly maneuver the macho bravado as Cheeks’ Drew handles a pistol in the comic crescendo in which Dekle’s awkwardly man-handling Ben accidentally shoots Drew in the foot.
In the classic move of turnabout as fair play the tension between Drew and Ben builds as Ben is dared to shoot himself to see how it feels which he adequately fumbles.
The second act provides Jessica a turn with Ben to make her that agent of vengeance for her burgeoning relationship with Drew as she ably uses the pistol in her sole interaction with Ben.
The last act also centers on Walter’s having a heart episode from a condition unbeknownst to Marley, with his being whisked away to the hospital, marking the denouement of that delicate father-daughter dynamic with that Electra complex personified as Marley is “visited” by Walter’s “ghost” offstage as they recount favorite memories of her growing up, of how she came to leave and how she wishes to stay.
The performance also coincided with the ACT2 Player’s annual dinner show and fundraiser, with a barbecue dinner provided by Burger Boy of Murphy. Next season’s plays were also announced, with Treasure Island and A Christmas Carol scheduled for later in 2024.
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