Austin American-Statesman
Performance: Galveston, Texas
12-Apr-98

GALVESTON -- For those concerned about the reserve of jokes remaining in fictional Tuna, Texas, set your mind at ease. Your appetite will be sated by "Red, White and Tuna," which opened Wednesday at the 1094 Grand Opera House in Galveston.

The third installment in the Austin-born series about a tiny Texas town will not arrive at the Paramount Theatre until May 5, but audiences for the Galveston premiere are giving its stars, Joe Sears and Jaston Williams, the hearty endorsement most Tuna- watchers anticipated.

Like "Greater Tuna" and "A Tuna Christmas," also written by Sears, Williams and Ed Howard, "Red, White and Tuna" consists of vignettes joining the lives of bubble-haired housewife Bertha Bumiiller, gargle-voiced gun- saleswoman Didi Snavely, smut-snatching petty tyrant Vera Carp, big-bosomed, big-hearted Aunt Pearl Burras and a host of mostly small-minded, mostly funny Tuna Texans.

The latest edition is set, as the title suggests, during Fourth of July celebrations, which coincide with the Tuna High School Re- union. It would be sinful to give away even a modest portion of the many plot twists, but we con safe- ly say that there is more romance and sex, as anticipated in the fi- nal scene of "A Tuna Christmas," which allowed a chaste dance be- tween hard-shelled Baptist Ber- tha and divorced radio personality Arles Sturvie.

Most of the Bumiller clan return for the holidays, with an especially entertaining turn by the very pregnant and everlastingly whiney Charlene. Stanley, the blackest sheep of the Bumiller family, has made good as an artist in New Mexico, which, in this play, generally stands for some sort of enlightened desert paradise, poised to transform culturally deprived West Texans.

Pearl, Didi and Vera, we very shortly learn, are in fierce competition for the crown of reunion queen, launching them into olympic exchanges of insults during the first act. (You didn't think I would reveal who won the contest, did you?) Relative newcomers Inita Goodwin and Helen Bedd, the man-chasing waitresses, return in Formica-hard form, joined by first-timers Amber Windchime and Star Birdfeather, two ex-Tunavians who had escaped to Lubbock to become flower children.

Sweetly high, Windchime (Williams at his gentlest) and Birdfeather (Sears curiously inward) will win instant recognition in Austin, where their spiritual cohorts proliferate in great numbers. Their quest to find something edible at the meat-heavy Tuna picnic will tickle anyone who has endured the extremes of Austin's pure-foods phenomenon.

For the most part, the jokes and pokes at Texas life were never funnier, crackling with precision and country flavor. Nevertheless, whole scenes tended to disintegrate into ever-more-nasty barrages of insults, becoming almost uncomfortable in their bald-faced misanthropy.

The good humor and humanity that has kept the Tuna series afloat returns in the final scenes. With obvious delight, Sears and Williams toy with sexual themes, displaying much sympathy for their characters, even when wrong-minded. Adding a grace note, the darkest episode from an earlier Tuna is recalled and softened, suggesting ways that the trilogy can grow when all three are played in concordance.

Many Galveston spectators seemed prepared to laugh at anything, even some half-baked gags, somewhat like the studio audience attending a hit TV sitcom during its final seasons. People laughed at the mere memory of having laughed before.

To tell the truth, some gags, such as Didi's singing and Pearl's nubby nightrobe, have lost their freshness. Others routines veered slightly off course in Galveston, but could very well be clinched -- or cut -- by the time "Red, White and Tuna" reaches Austin. Perhaps it was never really in question, but since this third version was so long in coming ("A Tuna Christmas" bowed in 1989), it remained conceivable in the intervening years that there was no more Tuna left in reserve. Rest assured, there is plenty to go around.