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The Herald
By Diane Wright |
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Seattle -- You'll be laughing (or maybe sobbing with laughter) at Red, White and Tuna, isn't merely a comic parody of small-town America. It's a virtuoso turn by two superb actors, Jaston Williams and Joe Sears, who don everything form white buck shoes to bouffant hair to become 21 citizens of the fictional town of Tuna, Texas, "The third smallest town in Texas, located somewhere between Southwest Texas and Hell." We first met them in Greater Tuna, with deejay Thurston Wheelis of Radio Station OKKK "serving the Greater Tuna area at two hundred and seventy-five watts," making this announcement: "Well, folds, in the news today, we've got the winner of the Tuna Junior High American Heritage Essay Contest for this year. An this year's winner is Connie Carp. She's the daughter of W.H. and Vera Carp here in Tuna, and the name of her essay was titled 'Human Rights, Why Bother?' Second place went to Jimbo Beaumont for 'Living with Radiation,' and third place went to Levita Posey for her essay titled, 'The Other Side of Bigotry...' with subjects like that, I don't know how they ever picked a winner." Red, White and Tuna continues the saga of the fictional town's characters: Among his 10 roles, Joe Sears plays Bertha Bumiller, fiancee to Arles Struvie, a hulking comic gem in a lime-green pantsuit, red blouse with white stars and Big Hair. In the scene with her hugely pregnant daughter Charlene, ("If she gets any bigger, she's gonna need zoning") Jaston Williams, who fields 11 roles, plays both Bertha's daughter AND her son Stanley, the ex-juvenile delinquent "voted most likely to succumb" and now a demigod in the Southwest Texas art world. What's amazing is that in all this visual outrageousness is how genuine the relationships are. Even Bertha and Arles' mid-life honeymoon scamperings and their bickering feel strangely real. As Vera Carp, Williams plays a woman who leads the Smut Snatchers brigade and calls all her maids "Lupe." She tells Pearl, her best friend, "I'd say something ugly, but God has punished you already." Only two creative virtuosos who have long worked together could bring this off -- the Tuna plays originated 15 years ago -- and they do, with some new age twists. Onto the scene comes a mysterious character: R.R. Snavely, the long-lost husband of Didi Snavely, owner of Didi's Used Weapons (all her weapons are guaranteed to kill. "It's on our guarantee: 'If Didi's can't kill it, it's immortal'"). R.R. had been taken away by a UFO some years ago, and he re-emerges from a ramp like Klaatu in War of the Worlds, an overall-wearing good ol' boy who seems to have acquired some unusual powers. He can now click off people's voices like a remote, which he promptly does to his wife when Didi starts ragging on him: "Where in the hell have you been?" R.R. Snavely's return to the galaxies with his new extraterrestrial wife -- another browbeater, if one can tell -- is a show-stopper. Part of the appeal of the Tuna shows is that , with such a range of characters, they can coax a laugh from any age group. Who can't empathize with guilt-racked Aunt Pearl, whose "tangy" potato salad makes the whole town sick ("The food's fine," says caterer Helen Bedd, "it's been in the back of the truck for three hours"). There are the young and the old, the outrageous and the poignant, all against a scorched-earth set depicting desolate, cactus-strewn West Texas landscape. Imagine Andy of Mayberry, add in Thelma and Louise, Tootsie, The Last Picture Show, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, and Hair and you have an idea of the appeal of the show. The good news is that though Sears and Williams are busy actors and writers, they believe there's no end of Tuna stories. Or Tuna fans, for that matter. They're right.
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