Review: ACT 1's COME BACK TO THE FIVE AND DIME, JIMMY DEAN, JIMMY DEAN

What happens when a group of teenagers idolize a celebrity - a figure from popular culture whose charisma ensures he will live on forever despite his death at a young age - reunite some 20 years later to further venerate their crush and to recall his impact on their young lives? That's the question considered in Ed Graczyk's Come Back to the Five and Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean, the tragicomedy now onstage as the final production of ACT 1's 2015-16 season at Nashville's Darkhorse Theater.

Directed with her usual eye for detail by Melissa Williams, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean features some strong performances (Memory Strong, Laurel Baker Harrison, Anastasia Zavaro and Kathleen Jaffe deliver the goods, despite the shortcomings of Graczyk's script) and some mediocre ones, exemplifying the challenges of community theater. As the plot moves from 1975 to 1955 and back and forth again, Graczyk's script is more contrived and dated, lacking in subtlety and nuance.

Set in McCarthy, Texas, circa 1975, some 20 years after director George Sanders filmed his epic film of Edna Ferber's sweeping novel Giant - the story of a Lone Star State family and its soap operatic rise to fame and fortune that starred Elizabeth Taylor, Rock Hudson, Mercedes McCambridge and the enigmatic and brooding James Dean in the final role of his all-too-brief career - Graczyk's play focuses on a group of small-town friends who idolize Dean, forming a fan club called "The Disciples of James Dean," headed by young Mona, who worked as an extra on the film (if you remember the scene were Taylor's Leslie faints during a barbecue at Reata, you can see Mona's face just up and to her left as she swoons). Mona's transfiguring experience on the film set leads her to claim that Dean (whom we now know was notoriously bisexual in life and not given to lot of sex with girls) impregnated her during an assignation on the front porch of the façade of the Reata manor house, a towering Gothic edifice set amid the windblown flatlands punctuated with mesquite and tumbleweeds near Marfa, Texas, the site of the on-location shooting.

Mona's claim that she gave birth to the scion of Dean's family name, fuels her hopes of gaining her own sense of celebrity and somehow escaping the confines of small-town life, all the while ensuring she will be imprisoned by its societal constraints even as she clings to her son - Jimmy Dean - so vehemently and steadfastly that she fails to acknowledge the realities of their shared life.

It should come as no surprise that Graczyk's uneven script results in an uneven production that somehow succeeds despite the odds. At one moment, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean is gimmicky and falsely progressive, while at the next it seems authentic and, in fact, ahead of its time. By turns, Graczyk's dialogue is fresh and focused while alternately it's predictable, relying on the very worst of stereotypes. His characters, who on the surface appear sentimentalized by the author, are hard to identity with - in fact, Graczyk seems content to vilify them by proxy as the plot unravels onstage.

As Mona and her old friends gather for the 20th anniversary of the night of Dean's untimely demise in a car wreck on September 30, 1955, we find McCarthy, Texas, dusty and dry: it hasn't rained in three years and the water in the town's municipal system has reduced to little more than a few drips. There's a desolate and defeated ambience, credibly designed by Williams and her production team (Dave McGinnis' lighting design and Darell Crawford's sound design give fine support to Williams' own, uncredited set design that creates the perfect setting: Kressmont's 5 and Dime, a 1950s era dime store that has changed little in the intervening two decades), that permeates the theater, lending an all-too-credible feel to the production.

If potboilers of the era - on the written page or committed to film - have taught us anything, you can bet your bottom dollar that the characters are harboring secrets beneath the chipped veneer of their period demeanors. And perhaps therein you can find the weaknesses of Graczyk's play; those secrets are so significantly telegraphed early on in the play that the story seems to unfold at a lugubrious pace despite the fact that director Williams has staged the show at a good one.

Strong delivers a winning performance as the conflicted Mona, showing off both the character's strengths and failings to equal measure, creating a persona steeped in longing for the past and lost in a cloud of nostalgic resolve. She keeps you riveted to Mona's tale with a heartfelt rendering of her character. Harrison very nearly steals the show with her no-holds-barred interpretation of the buxom Sissy, playing her with gleeful abandon and imbuing her with spirit and bravado. Jaffe, in the role of Stella May (the one character who has moved from McCarthy to find her oil-rich fortune with an unseen husband who adores her, suggests), is full of brass and sass even as she portrays the thoroughly unlikable character with bold self-assurance.

Anastasia Zavaro plays the character of Joanne with what might best be described as reserved aplomb - she may actually be the most authentic character created by Graczyk, despite the character's unique sensibilities and design, which represents the very dated aspects of the play, that which most distinctly recalls the morals, manners and mores of the mid-1970s era represented.

Molly Breen and Adele Akin complete the "now" (1975) cast of characters as a not-so-dumb hanger-on and as the owner of the aforementioned five and dime, but they are underserved by Graczyk's script.

The actors portraying the characters then (1955) are uneven, at best: Jenni Cadaret is terrific as the younger Sissy, despite the fact that she's a good six to eight inches taller than Harrison, while Kristin Parsons (as young Mona) is miscast -- she looks older than Strong onstage and her acting performance (if it can be called such) lacks focus. William Welch shows some promise as young Joe, but obviously needs a stronger directorial hand to help him fashion a credible portrayal.

• Come Back to the Five and Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean. By Ed Graczyk. Directed by Melissa Williams. Presented by ACT 1, at Darkhorse Theater, Nashville. Through May 21. For details, go to www.ACT1Online.com. Running time: 2 hours, 10 minutes (with one 15-minute intermission).

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