Huston Chronicle
Performance: Huston, Texas
11-Apr-98

'Red , White and Tuna' begins with a disgruntled Aunt Pearl Burrus tossing a string of lighted firecrackers into the bedroom where her husband is sleeping - an expression of displeasure at his failure to remember their wedding anniversary.

That's a crackling comic opening, and subsequent scenes continue to snap and pop in this lively third installment of the Tuna saga from writer-actors Joe Sears and Jaston Williams. It's enjoying its world premiere through April 19 at Galveston's Grand 1894 Opera House.

The mythical "third smallest town in Texas," Tuna first found fame in the team's Greater Tuna , then mined a warmer vein in the holiday sequel A Tuna Christmas. Like the much-traveled earlier shows, this one is written by Sears and Williams in collaboration with Ed Howard, who again directs with inventiveness, shrewd pacing and clever visual touches. There's even a spaceship arrival that, in its own way, proves every bit as effective as the helicopter in Miss Saigon.

Sears and Williams, marvelously resourceful character actors, play all the cozy, crazy characters who people this peculiar burg. This time around, it's the Fourth of July, and the inhabitants are preparing for festivities that include a high school reunion and the crowning of the Reunion Queen. Frenzied rivalry exists among the finalists: sweet, old and occasionally malicious Aunt Pearl; self-righteous busybody Vera Carp, who heads the local Smut Snatchers; and gravel-voiced, chain-smoking Didi Snavely, proprietor of Didi's Used Weapons.

While the action unfolds as a series of sketches, threads of narrative and connections between characters lend it the texture of a play. The chief plot line this time involves the impending wedding of divorced radio announcer Arles Struvie and beleaguered single homemaker Bertha Bumiller - a union threatened by disagreement about where to spend the honeymoon. Arles wants to go to a rattlesnake round-up, while Bertha yearns to visit a passion play in the faraway hills of Arkansas.

Joe Bob Lipsey is distraught that his latest little theater extravaganza has been shut down by Vera's censors and repairs to Didi's to purchase a suicide weapon. Guess who will be chosen Reunion Queen through a surge of mischievous write-in votes?

Animal lover Petey Fisk protests an upcoming "pest bashing" event by remaining in a small enclosure with several scorpions - but winds up admitting this is one species he no longer wants to protect. R.R. Snavely, Didi's long-missing husband, is deposited back on Earth by the UFO that abducted him - and there's a potent gag in store about his intergalactic companion's similarities to the dreaded Didi.

Racy Tastee-Kreme waitresses Helen Bedd and Inita Goodwin preside over a food booth at the reunion, blithely giving half the town food poisoning by dishing out potato salad left in the sun too long.

Two new characters prove particularly funny: Amber Windchime and Star Birdfeather, the aging yet mellow hippie chicks who fled Tuna long ago and changed their names (from Fern and Bernice), but who return for the reunion to find that Tuna has not changed one whit. Always ready to "roll another for the road," distraught at their inability to locate any "organic motor oil," they express concern for one another with such lines as "Oh, Star, your aura is very weak!" These two could be sisters of "the Dude," hero of the Coen Brothers' latest film, The Big Lebowski.

Deliciously droll in their hippie-chick guises, Sears and Williams are in fine form throughout. They almost always succeed at giving each of their many roles a distinctive look and sound. Williams' most memorable creations include his drily malevolent Didi and pushy Vera, while Sears' sensible Aunt Pearl and long-suffering Bertha Bumiller remain indelible creations, with a poignant streak amid their humor.

Naturally, some of the novelty has begun to wear off. But by now, the familiarity of the characters has its advantages - much like the trademark lines and gestures one welcomes in the work of famous comics. The writing, if not always as sharp as it might be, is nonetheless almost always funny.

Tuna remains an apt expression of small-town attitudes and of the conflicting impulses toward helpfulness and hostility in contemporary American life. At once folksy and subversive, 'Red , White and Tuna' sometimes sounds like the product of a collaboration between Will Rogers and Lenny Bruce.