‘Petrified Forest’ Thoroughly

Overcomes Possible Clichés

By Julie Stern

SHERMAN — When The Sherman Playhouse announced it would close out the 2003 season with a production of Robert Sherwood’s Depression era melodrama The Petrified Forest, for this reviewer it immediately summoned up memories of the 1936 movie that launched Humphrey Bogart as the hardboiled gangster Duke Mantee ( and also starred Bette Davis and Leslie Howard at early points in their careers). Further, it prompted worries that the play would be a stiff clunker in which the cast tried too hard to reproduce a movie that had long hardened into a chestnut.

Happily, that is not the case at all.

Co-directors Christine Daly and Peter Michaels have not only gotten fine acting from every member of the cast, but, using Michaels’ insight that “humor can lubricate what creaks,” the directors had the good sense to balance the tension and tragedy with the play’s genuine comic lines and moments. As a result, the whole effect was absorbing and entertaining, and Sherwood’s characters came through as complex and believable people, rather than dated clichés.

For those who aren’t familiar with the story, a desperate gang of outlaws – the object of a four-state manhunt –  hole up in a lonely Arizona diner, taking an assortment of prisoners including the young waitress, her grandfather, an ex-football player gas pump jockey, a wealthy couple from Ohio who stopped to use the restroom, and a disillusioned writer who is hitchhiking across the country.

Twenty years later William Inge would use a similar idea when he stranded a motley group of bus passengers in a snowstorm in his comedy-drama Bus Stop, but in comparison to The Petrified Forest, that was more of a feel-good piece of Fifties sentimentality.

Sherwood, who was gassed in World War I and went on to write the Academy Award winning Best Years of our Lives in 1946, was deeply absorbed in social problems and the search for meaning in a world that was torn by forces beyond the control of the ordinary individuals he wrote about. Written in 1934, in the depth of the Great Depression, the play resonates with expressions of frustration and despair by the characters who are trapped in dead-end jobs and hopeless situations from which they see no realistic escape.

Jason Maple, the disgruntled operator of the lunchroom with too few paying customers, swaggers about in his American Legion regalia and loses himself in right-wing fantasies. His alcoholic father, Gramp, harks back to the days of outlaws, his greatest memory being the time Billy the Kid shot at him (and missed).

Jason’s daughter Gabby waits on tables, reads poetry and hides her paintings as she dreams of a paradise called France. Boze Hertzlinger carries in his pocket a newspaper clipping that says he could have been as great as Red Grange, if only he had gone to a more famous school than the local tech. Now, though he graduated college, he spends his days pumping gas and trying to win Gabby’s affections.

Two very different strangers arrive to disrupt the lonely entropy: Alan Squiers, the penniless drifter cadging a meal, turns out to be a literate and sensitive intellectual who forms a genuine emotional connection with Paula as he tells her of his own life in France, and listens sympathetically (if sardonically) to her aspirations of going there and finding the war-bride mother who abandoned her and Jason to go back “home.”

Duke Mantee, the alleged murderer of six in an Oklahoma shootout, bursts in with several of his henchmen to wait for the rest of the gang to show up so they can all escape to Mexico.

In a sense Sherwood was grappling with the question of what has happened to America. Squiers recites to Gabby from the T.S. Eliot poem “The Hollow Men” as a portrait of an industrialized world that has turned humans into soulless robots. To old Gabby, Duke Mantee represents the last trace of the rugged individualists who had the courage and strength to conquer the west. Because Sherwood was such a competent dramatist, the characters spring to life and act in ways that give the plot some unexpected and provocative twists.

Directors Daley and Michaels have gotten excellent performances from their entire cast. Sixteen-year-old Marilyn Hubbell holds the play together with a remarkable mixture of poise and naïveté as Gabby. She is matched by veteran Steve Manzino doing some of the best work of his career as Alan Squiers.

Denis Lybe as Gramp, Christian Saretto as Boze, Gary McNerney as Jason, and Bob Brown as Duke Mantee are all strong and believable in their roles, while Terry Johanesen, Sr and Judy Sullivan as the wealthy couple who are thrown together with the others manage to be pompous and obnoxious but drawn into the situation in spite of themselves.

With the exception of a rather foolish burlesque of a curtain call, The Petrified Forest is beautifully done and well worth seeing, not just as a piece of American theatrical history, but as a worthwhile play in itself. And for lovers of realistic, detailed sets, Jim West and Peter Michaels have put together a beauty.

(Performances continue Friday and Saturday evenings and Sunday afternoons until October 25.

The theater, behind Sherman Firehouse at the intersection of routes 37 and 39, can be contacted at 860-354-3622 for reservations and additional information.)