Pity the poor Texas redneck. The comedy Greater Tuna, by Joe Sears, Jaston Williams, and Ed Howard (at Firehouse Theater through September 2) comes on like a list of calumnies and grievances filed with some anti-defamation league for white trash.The play is a sort of Steel Magnolias with an axe to grind, although only two actors perpetrate 18 characters, from radio announcers to the cold-eyed female owner of a used gun emporium.
We find ourselves in the imaginary town of Tuna, Texas, initially in the radio booth of station OKKK-AM. Actors Rick Bagley and John Brennan are announcers Thurston Wheelis and Arles Struvie, respectively, who introduce and morph into the carnival of clownish denizens we gradually meet.
Tuna itself becomes an early character, as community announcements are broadcast. We learn that a high school student won an essay competition with a composition titled “Human Rights — Why Bother?” (Close competition was one arguing “The Other Side of Racism.”) Tunanians are a practical people, so an upcoming production of My Fair Lady will be set in Polynesia, since the set for South Pacific is already up and available. “Negro and Mexican-American” actors are invited to audition: “Who knows? You just might get a part in the chorus.”
The 101-degree heat might be almost as annoying as the cloud of locusts currently munching through the area, but luckily an approaching torrential tropical storm should blow away both problems. All is not tragedy: Judge Roscoe Buckner, we are told, has just expired from a stroke, found in his bed wearing a modest one-piece turquoise Dale Evans swimsuit — it was just an ugly rumor that it was a bikini.
One minute Brennan is sucking on a bottle of Lone Star as the outgoing Arles, and the next he is meekly imploring us as the nasal Petey Fisk, head of the Greater Tuna Humane Society. Petey is begging radio listeners to adopt one of the stray dogs pawing the cyclone fencing at the overcrowded animal pound. He even puts in a few good words about ducks and laments that “the Chinese eat their feet.”
The first act introduces such drawling denizens as Petey, and the second gives them more to do, largely dropping the radio station forum. We get to know the various members of the Bumiller family, who provide what little storyline Greater Tuna possesses. Mother Bertha is sending the kids off to school, or at least giving it a try. Son Stanley, a recent reform school graduate, has made a hobby of playing hooky from trade school. One of his sister Charlene’s major activities is stealing his blue jeans and agonizing loudly as she tries to squeeze into them. She had her heart set on being a cheerleader at her high school but was turned down at the tryouts. She has written a poem about how she no longer has reason to live after that; Bertha wearily insists that there are plenty of reasons, but at the moment she can’t come up with one.
Bertha belongs to the BBB — the Better Baptists Bureau — as well as a charity called Tuna Helpers. But it is as a prominent participant in another civic organization that she is being interviewed by a reporter. As a dedicated member of the Smut Snatchers of the New Order, she is working hard to remove from library shelves such offensive literature as Romeo and Juliet, because it promotes teen sex.
