Date: Fri 13-Sep-1996

Publication: Bee

Author: DONNAM

Location: A10

Quick Words:

Town-Players-Fifth-July-rev

Full Text:

(rev "Fifth of July" @Town Players, 9/13/96)

Theatre Review-

Town Players' Latest An Absolute Winner

By Julie Stern

When Newtown's Town Players steer clear of farce and comic chestnuts and put

their energies toward serious contemporary drama, the results can be very

rewarding. This is definitely the case with the September offering, Lanford

Wilson's Fifth of July . Director Bob Johnson and producer Ruth Anne

Baumgartner have taken a challenging play, assembled a talented cast, and put

together an absolute winner.

The play is about relationships past and present and the struggle to preserve

the capacity for idealism in the face of emotional burnout and personal

tragedy. As with The Big Chill or The Return of The Secaucus Seven , the plot

involves a weekend reunion of a group of friends who were campus radicals

together in the Sixties.

Thirteen years after he went off to Berkeley, together with his kid sister and

his best friend, Kenneth Talley Jr, has come home to settle on the family farm

outside of Lebanon, MO, teaching English at his old high school, while his

lover, Jed Jenkins, lays the foundation for an English garden.

His aunt, Sally Talley Friedman, has chosen Independence Day as a good time to

scatter the ashes of her beloved husband, Matt. It is for this occasion the

others have gathered as well: Kenneth's sister June and her teenage daughter

Shirley have come in from St. Louis. "Old friend" John Landis and his wife

Gwen are visiting from Nashville, bringing with them a young, and apparently

permanently stoned, guitarist.

At first the play seems very much a comedy arising from the clash of very

different personality types. Tense Kenneth and laid-back Jed seem the makings

of a classic "odd couple." Twangy Aunt Sally is a bit offbeat: She has been

carrying those ashes around for a year in a blue candy box she keeps

misplacing.

Incredibly foul-mouthed Gwen Landis is the heiress to a copper fortune who now

dreams of making it as a country singer, while her cheerfully randy husband is

carrying out some secret business scam on the phone. Precocious Shirley keeps

thinking she's 21 instead of thirteen, and Wes the guitarist stands around

making doper talk.

This all works, by the way, because the dialogue is truly funny and because

the actors carry it off with perfect timing and body language. But The Fifth

Of July is a much more serious work. Beneath the veneer of eccentricity and

self mockery are some terrible wounds that have never completely healed.

The most literal case is that of Kenneth himself, whose physical "stiffness"

comes from having had his legs blown off in Vietnam. Barely able to hobble

around on crutches (we only discover this midway through the first act) he is

struggling against the self-destructive lure of booze.

June, whose student days were marked by anti-war protests and other radical

movements, was punished by her parents for having an illegitimate child,

father apparently unknown. Pronouncing her unfit to be a mother, they gave the

baby to Sally and Matt to raise. Shirley is openly defiant and contemptuous of

her, despite June's desire to make a home for her daughter, now that the

senior Talleys have moved to a retirement community and are pressuring Sally

to join them there.

The high-living, Quaalude-popping, coke-snorting Gwen Landis is carrying

around her own burdens, including the deaths of nearly her entire family, and

her own inability to have children as a result of her drug abuse.

Aunt Sally does not want to move to California, to join the brother who never

forgave her for marrying a Jew (but who wants to take control over her life

now that she is a widow). Her continued refusal to put closure on the past by

scattering the ashes is really her valiant attempt to retain her independence.

A swaggering buffoon, John Landis is attempting to cover up a variety of

unrevealed past treacheries as he manipulates his wife's business interests as

well as her singing career, trying to buy her "success" in order to take her

mind off his encroachments on her newly-acquired copper company.

The acting is superb throughout, as the players make their characters grow and

emerge as complex human beings. Glory Gallo is wonderful as Gwen, and Jo

Voight is supremely convincing as the gallant, crusty Aunt Sally. Peter Wood

is understandably bitter and also attractive and decent as Kenneth, while Joe

Koproski combines physical power and gentle patience as the easygoing

botanist, Jed.

Patrick Spaulding, who has played wonderful Shakespearian clowns in previous

Little Theater productions, is outstanding as John Landis. Robert Dale Walker

as guitarist Weston Hurley is a fine comic actor whose dazed befuddlement

actually serves as a growing moral commentary, a mirror reflecting what has

happened to the people around him.

The play itself is a moral commentary on the America whose birthday is being

celebrated, and on the wounds dealt to our national social fabric by Vietnam,

and the conflicts of the Sixties. So many people were so damaged, either by

the corruption of the war or by the cost of adhering to their dreams, that a

decade later the Seventies emerged in reaction as a new age of

self-centeredness and greed.

Still, there is hope for survival in Shirley's teenage dreams of a future full

of artistic possibility, in Jed's garden that will take twenty years to reach

fruition, in Kenneth's courage to risk stepping back into a classroom. Things

no longer seem as easy or as fun as they did before Vietnam, but there are

still possibilities to try.

And certainly you should try to get tickets to this show before it is sold

out!