A Texas Trilogy (Theater Review)
Kelly, Patrick
THEATER REVIEW A Texas Trilogy Three Plays by Preston Jones Patrick Kelly In the spring of 1974, I went to a performance in the tiny "second" auditorium in the basement of the Dallas Theater...
...Now, a little more than two years later, it seems I was an unknowing witness to the birth of a phenomenon, A Texas Trilogy...
...After seeing the success which met The Last Meeting of the Knights of the White Magnolia in professional and amateur productions all over the country, the Kennedy Center produced all three plays in Washington--with the intention of transferring the shows to Broadway...
...The Oldest Living Graduate focuses on the relationship of Colonel J.C...
...Can you imagine that...
...With a build-up in the press like the trilogy had, it was no wonder that the September 21 opening at the Broadhurst Theater was anticipated like the Second Coming...
...Preston Jones completed two other plays about Bra~eyville after tRt 8 maq:ces~ of the first: Lu Ann Hampton ~ ObGrlander shows the eponymous ~ first as a good-hearted, empty-headed bobby-soxer, then as a bewildered divorcee, and finally as a mellowing and resigned widow, slipping into middle age with a brainless daughter who seems all set to repeat the pattern of her mother's life...
...The play ends with the black custodian of the broken down hotel turning out the lights (for the Last Time...
...In those plays--as in D.H...
...Alexander (manger of the A.B.C...
...Hell, there were governors and senators that was Brother Knights...
...and, after 62 performances, the show closed on October 31...
...Richard Coe, the tough critic for the Post, said, "Not since the Philadelphia premiere of Death of a Salesman in 1949 have I been so profoundly satisfied with a play and its production...
...32 The Alternative: An American Spectator January 1977...
...the houses thinned out...
...That the plays came out of a resident theater company (a new part of the American theater in the past 15 years...
...The Grand Imperial Wizard of the brotherhood rode in a big open carriage pulled by six white horses, and up above the whole shebang was this great old big blimp towin' this-here banner sayin' TULSA WELCOMES THE KNIGHTS OF THE WHITE MAGNOLIA...
...Oldest living graduate, oldest living Indian, oldest living armadillo, oldest living nuthin', 'cause that means you're all alone...
...The new highway has bypassed it and now the world is trying to...
...Took over a whole hotel there in Tulsa...
...And the economic climate of New York theater is such now that even a moderately-expensive production cannot survive the impact of anything less than unanimous raves: and with three casts to pay and three sets to be changed daily, A Texas Trilogy was more than moderately expensive...
...Perhaps the odd mixture of comic, pathetic, grotesque, and elegiac elements in the playsMas well as the trilogy form itself, cumbersome and expensive to sustain--made a Broadway success doubtful from the start: but with his plays on stages all over the country, what, after all, does PrestonJones really have to worry about...
...Kinkaid, a seventyfive-year-old veteran of what Bradleyville folk call "World's War I , " and his avaricious son, who wants to develop some of the old man's land into "Mumford County Estates"--summer homes like Lopahin's dream for the Cherry Orchard in Chekhov's play...
...The action is set in Bradleyville, a fictional place described in the script as " a small, dead West Texas town in the middle of a big, dead West Texas prairie between Abilene and San Angelo...
...They turned around and stabbed their granddaddies square in the back...
...The Knights are a handful of good o1' boys, the last remaining members of a white supremacist lodge which once had numbers in the thousands...
...Bands playin' and baton girls a-marchin' along...
...Nobody wanted to join...
...They wanted to be Jaycees or Toast Masters or Elks or Lions or Moose, they wanted to be by-God animals, that's right, animals, but not knights...
...But, far from dulling its impact, the repetitions in speech, situation, and character relationship give the insight a concreteness and subtlety which ultimately distinguish the trilogy as a unique theatrical accomplishment...
...The reviews were mixed...
...Loss in isolation: it is what Jones' community suffers from in each of the three plays...
...It's the gradual wearing-away of things that gets you, Jones' plays tell us over and over again...
...Patrick Kelly is theater director at the University of Dallas...
...Lawrence's excellent dramas of" the same period dealing with the lives of Nottinghamshire coal miners--the grasp of local dialect and provincial concerns and lifezpatterns provide the distinctive quality of the work...
...As things happen, however, the induction is aborted when the initiate runs out--and the remaining Knights all follow suit, each finding his own reason for giving up his membership...
...Stand around lookin' for the nextoldest livin' whippersnapper and wonder where the hell ever'body went...
...The present is lost to the past, lives change, and the characters never realize what's happening until it's all over...
...They didn't want to be Knights of the White Magnolia...
...His localism brings to mind the English "Manchester school," a group of Lancashire dramatists (of whom Harold Brighouse was the most famous) who wrote their plays for performance first at a resident theater at the industrial capital during the first decades of this century...
...So, following a 16-week run of sold-out houses, the production went to New York...
...it seemed that the ideal of regional theater was about to be realized with the arrival of a group of plays written outside the pressures and interests of New York by a worker in a resident rep company...
...It was a satisfying production of a very good first play: Preston Jones clearly has an ear for the dialect of West Texas, and he had forged that regional patois into a special language for the stage...
...Listen to L.D...
...Supermarket) explaining to Lonnie Roy McNeil, the lodge's prospective new member, why the Knights no longer have regular conventions: Stupidity, Lonnie Roy...
...Gawd, and it musta been somethin' to see...
...The play was The Last Meeting of the Knights of the I~hite Magnolia, the first effort at playwrighting of Preston Jones, a long-time member of the DTC acting company...
...in the seedy meeting room, chuckling to himself as he repeats some of the text of the ludicrous initiation ceremony...
...In refusing to be honored as the oldest living graduate of Mirabeau B. Lamar Military Academy, Colonel Kinkaid articulates this feeling common to all the plays: To hell with it]...It ain't no honor to be the oldest livin" anything...
...People got to where they didn't wnat to join up any more...
...the bt/siness of the meeting is the induction of a new member into their almost vanished ranks...
...The critics, for the most part, came to the openings with expectations so inflated that at least a tinge of disappointment was inevitable in their reviews...
...THEATER REVIEW A Texas Trilogy Three Plays by Preston Jones Patrick Kelly In the spring of 1974, I went to a performance in the tiny "second" auditorium in the basement of the Dallas Theater Center...
...Gawda mighty, now wasn't that somethin...
...No new people...
...The Washington reception was ecstatic...
...We had con-ventions and barbecues and parades...
...that they drew and pleased audiences in a variety of situations outside of New York...
...Turned up their noses on their race, started kowtowin' to all them there mi-norities, and little by little the lodges jest sorter dried up...
...And the milieu of Bradleyville gains in solidity and detail with each successive drama...
...and that they couldn't survive on Broadway reflects more light on the whole relationship of the "regional" theater to the Broadway establishment than it does on the merits of the plays themselves...
...Happily, these subsequent plays lose none of the verbal vigor and texture of the first one...
...Pure by-God dumb stupidity...
...Jesus, but we was big once, Lonnie Roy...
...A Texas Trilogy became a national phenomenon thanks to an effort to produce the three plays in a rotating repertory on Broadway...
...This feverish anticipation proved to be the project's undoing...
...It achieves, finally, a kind of universality as an image of life that has lost its vital energy sour.ces and whose existence is marked by the failures, one by one, of its fading faculties...
Vol. 10 • January 1977 • No. 4
