Laundry and Bourbon and Lone Star at The Elite Theatre Company
Two one-act plays are connected in surprising ways at The Elite Theatre Company in Oxnard. James McLure’s Laundry and Bourbon and Lone Star, onstage through Feb. 12, take place in the deep heart of Texas in the wake of the Vietnam War. Laced with humor, they deal with parallel worlds: girlfriends chatting on a porch in the heat of the afternoon and good ol’ boys shooting the breeze under the stars outside a dive bar. On the surface, it’s just friends talking but, as it so often happens, truths come out in jest and, like pulling a thread from a sweater, one revelation leads to another and another until everything starts to unravel.
At the start of Laundry and Bourbon, Elizabeth (Lea Roman) is standing on her porch, looking out across the rural landscape towards the highway, watching and waiting for something, someone. Her friend Hattie (Jolyn Johnson) shows up, a bundle of energy and happy to be free of her rowdy kids for a few hours. The women chat while they fold laundry, watch TV and sip bourbon. They talk about their husbands and their high school glory days, their regrets and the promise and fear of the future. Then along comes Amy Lee (Maddie Boyd), an uninvited guest who prides herself on being a good Baptist and an upstanding member of the country club set. The tension between the women builds like an oncoming thunderstorm, complete with a lightning bolt or two. Roman, Johnson and Boyd have great chemistry and their dialogue flows as smoothly as that bourbon.
Scott Blanchard has never been better than he is playing Roy, the center of Lone Star. A troubled Vietnam veteran, Roy has seen better days and he holds onto the past like he does his prized 1959 pink Thunderbird. He was all that in high school, but now he’s a man burdened by the memory of war and what his life used to be. Patrick T. Rogers is wonderful as Roy’s naïve little brother Ray, who idolizes him. Where Roy is full of bravado, Ray is shy and a bit awkward, but both men have their secrets. They’re drinking beers and talking about everything, but mostly about women, when Cletis (the on-point Asher Mitchell), Roy’s nemesis, interrupts them. They act like nothing much has changed since high school, except so much has. The sting of the play is watching that realization ignite.
Under the skilled direction of Kimberly Demmary, the cast draws us deeply into the two stories. The rest of the aptly named elite crew includes costumer Sheryl Jo Bedal, props mistress Dolores Dyer, sound designer Bill Walthall, lighting designer Ernie Morrison, stage manager Katrina Rabusin, assistant producer Arriana Rodriguez and producer Hayley Silvers. The set design (uncredited) is clever: While one act plays out, the set of the other remains onstage in the shadows. It’s so very much like the characters themselves, in the dark about what really goes on under their noses.
Laundry and Bourbon and Lone Star are tender little snippets of a day and a night, but they hold whole lives within them.
Laundry and Bourbon and Lone Star through Feb. 12 at The Elite Theatre, 2731 S. Victoria Ave., Oxnard. For more information, call 805-483-5118 or visit www.theelite.org.