'Jimmy Dean' actors work magic

By CHRISTOPHER POTTER
NEWS ARTS WRITER

Now and then a director and his/her actors will so outstrip the play they’re presenting that one yearns to leap from the audience and award each of them a professional conjurer’s license.

Such is the amazing case with Ed Graczyk’s “Come Back to the Five and Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean,” whose performers turned dross to gold last night at Performance Network. To make a case for the play itself is like defending Ex-Lax: Graczyk’s 1982 work is strictly a loose cathartic, a dreadfully facile soaper tossing a half-dozen characters into a one-room bullpit for a “night of searing revelations,” as cliched theatrical vernacular has it.

In “Jimmy Dean’s” case it’s a day of searing revelations (unorthodox fellow, Graczyk), namely the 20-year anniversary of the “Disciples of James Dean,” a fan club formed in 1955 during the filming of Dean’s “Giant” near the podunk hamlet of McCarthy, Texas.

Reunited in a decrepit dime store that serves as “Jimmy Dean’s” locale, six female disciples go at each other hammer and tong in a catty eruption of accusations and recriminations largely too outlandish to pack any emotional wallop.

True, “Jimmy Dean” constantly rubs elbows with profundity - on the power of celebrity to intrude on reality (“He was our savior,” mourns one of the women. “He was the only one who understood”), or on the withering tedium of small-town life.

Yet far from soberly probing such problems, Graczyk drags his sufferin’ femmes through a string of revelations so grotesque and weird they seem a parody of Tennessee Williams’ purple-gothic period.

Worse yet, Graczyk’s gauche symbolism - the crumbling facade of “Giant’s” phony mansion, a portrait of Dean lit up like Christ - plus clunky time switches ’twixt 1975 and ’55, drive the play even further from reality into bathos.

Considering all the impediments, it seems a miracle that “Jimmy Dean” still emerges as a sweet-grinned evening of theater. Credit director David Hunsberger for stoking an atmosphere of “Hi, y’all” pizzazz: Posters and portraits of Dean loom everywhere, not only on the set but in the lobby as well. The onstage dime store is a wonderfully homely icon to things past, including a warhorse jukebox blasting the McGuire Sisters and Patsy Cline, plus a greasy-spoon snack bar that actually serves the theater audience during intermission.

And even if Hunsberger’s thespians can’t make their zonked characters believable (who could?), it’s rewarding enough to simply enjoy them as performers - juking to the taut rhythms of ensemble acting, ransacking their own inner resources to dredge up emotion simply for its own sake, undaunted by “Jimmy Dean’s” knuckle-brained excess. Their names are Maureen McGee, Laurie Johnson, Maggie Wysocki, Jonathan Katz, Sandra Lee Storrer, Lori Brown and Alicia Harris - an honor roll by any measurement of excellence. Bravo!

COME BACK TO THE FIVE AND DIME, JIMMY DEAN, JIMMY DEAN By Ed Graczyk. David Hunsberger, director; Anne M. Stoll, assistant director; Johanna Broughton and Peter Knox, set and lights; Jeffrey Hale, costumes; Edward Steven Matusak. sound. 'Come Back to the Five and Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean' will continue at Performance Network, 408 W. Washington, through Aug. 16. For ticket Information call 663-0681.