BWW Reviews: GREATER TUNA Finds Humor in the Dark Side of Small Towns at Theatre Harrisburg

Tuna, Texas. It's not just a play, it's been a way of life since 1981, in Austin, where the rest of the Republic of Texas had a chance to make acquaintance with its third smallest town in GREATER TUNA. Off-Broadway met Tuna in 1982, and then it went on tour for oh, more or less twenty-six years if you're including its three sequels. It's been claimed to be the most-produced play in America; if it isn't, it's close, and no one seems to be complaining about it. Maybe that's because the folks in Tuna are so much like us folks - or maybe it's because we're so happy that they aren't quite like us.

Over at Krevsky Center, Theatre Harrisburg and director Dan Burke have brought the environs of GREATER TUNA, Texas, into our neighborhood for a visit. The good folks at Radio OKKK, Thurston Wheelis (Dave Olmstead) and Arles Struvie (Kerry Mowery), of the Wheelis-Struvie Report, have arrived to give us all the news that's fit to read on the air - if they ever remember to go live - and introduce us to everyone there that are key players in the local news.

The rest of those good, or not-so-good, folks, also played by Olmstead and Mowery, look like a pretty unsavory lot of small-town folks, crackpots who are surprisingly unfortunately much like ourselves and our acquaintances. There's loosely a plot about the Bumiller family, whose daughter Charlene (Mowery) can't get over not being a cheerleader, even when reading her poetry on OKKK, whose son Jody (also Mowery) is a mutt-loving kid, and whose mother, Bertha (Olmstead), is related to Pearl Burras (also Olmstead) - whose attitude towards dogs, unlike Jody's, is "better off dead, especially if I kill them". Her nephew Stanley (Mowery) is equally dysfunctional, with a reform school background and a hatred for the local, freshly deceased, judge who was found in a women's swimsuit.

It's entirely possible that the only people you love may be Petey Fisk (Mowery) of the Greater Tuna Humane Society and UFOlogist RR Snavely (Olmstead), along with, of all people, the slightly fanatical anti-pornography coalition led by Reverend Spikes (Olmstead), but you'll come to understand them - perhaps rather more than you'd like to. Black humor abounds, though the highlight is Mowery, as Stanley Bumiller, confessing in great detail to the judge's corpse just how he arranged the judge's murder.

Also in the show are Klan leader Elmer Watkins (Olmstead), the tough-minded Sheriff Givens (Olmstead), and Vera Carp (Mowery), Reverend Spikes' assistant in the Smut Snatchers and leader of plans to eliminate objectionable words from the high school's dictionaries. The Smut Snatchers are horrid, but you've almost certainly met a crowd or at least a person or two like them, whether they're protesting Gay Pride or explaining why the most recent book about adorable penguins is morally bad for school students.

And that's the thing about this show. The black humor makes you laugh at things you wish you wouldn't (especially if you're an animal lover like Petey Fisk), while you become uncomfortably aware that you don't think you know any murderers, but you do know people who act just like that post-juvenile delinquent who... If you haven't spent your life with your head in the sand, the characters of the Greater Tuna area are painfully similar to the more disquieting people you already know. It's likely to make you look at your peculiar neighbor down the block just a little differently.

Olmstead and Mowery switch among ten different characters each, sometimes in mid-word or mid-step, with reckless abandon. They're fine choices for the two interpreters of these painfully peculiar people, and do a wonderful job of making the characters their own. This show lives or dies in good casting, which is most definitely present, and in keeping moving tightly, which director Burke has accomplished. The two-level set, of the radio station looming over a lower level that functions as several homes, a funeral home, churches, and everyplace else in town, is compact enough to allow the rapid transition needed for movement.

Several vignettes require short breaks filled with OKKK's country music; director Burke and crew must also be applauded for a truly appropriate selection of music coordinating with the scenes, and ranging from the best of Johnny Cash to the old classic novelty, "Dropkick Me, Jesus (Through the Goalposts of Life)". Most of the music has the audience singing along cheerily, although this writer was amused by the reaction to good old "Dropkick Me."

And remember, Greater Tuna, Texas isn't a place. For nearly 35 years, like its state of origin, it's been a state of mind. Wherever you live, you've been there. You just may not have realized it.

At Theatre Harrisburg through June 27. For tickets and information, visit www.theatreharrisburg.com or call 717-214-2787.

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