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review "Whatever happened to the plays that made ya stand up and cheer?" "Whatever happened to the plays that told the story of America?" A certain category of theatergoer (the mature, Republican kind) likes to pose these questions, both rhetorically and externally. The "answer" to these twin questions would be a play like Mom, or Jean Kerr, used to make -- a frothy comedy about well-moneyed suburbanites, or a bogus drama whose tension is solved by circumstance rather than the release of sexual, emotional or spiritual demons. These questions are really reactionary cries for a whiter and more intellectually facile theatre, and for a nation that no longer exists. And while it's tempting to assume that today's "well-made plays" are being written to answer these questions, the assumption is not always accurate. There are new naturalistic plays that do tell happy American stories in a powerful and endearing way. Just because somebody writes a play told in real time or set on a porch doesn't mean they're trying to appease a bunch of conservatives. Want an example? Take Arlene Hutton's "Last Train to Nibroc", now running at Santa Monica's Powerhouse Theatre. This superb two-hander is indeed a romantic dramedy about an America way back when. And its emotional pull, its intelligent storytelling, and its plea for tolerance are really quite timeless. This long one-act goes down in three scenes, taking us from December 1940 to mid-1943. We meet May (Milly Sanders) and Raleigh (Adam Saunders) on a train out of Los Angeles. They're ostensibly strangers, but it turns out they share a hometown -- Corbin, Kentucky, a God-fearing hamlet near the Cumberland Gap. May's just out of Bible college, and she intends to become a missionary. In fact, she's dutifully reading Magnificent Obsession, one of Lloyd C. Douglas’ Christian pulp novels. Raleigh, on the other hand, is thrilled to be riding on the same train as the corpses of two of his alcoholic idols, Nathaniel West and F. Scott Fitzgerald. (He's excited to report that both authors, newly dead, are back in the baggage car.) On the surface, their futures couldn't appear more certain: May will wear her white gloves to church and teach the Gospel, and the uniformed Raleigh will go to war. But America is changing, and so are their well-ordered plans. Last week, May was engaged to an Army Air Force cadet; last week, Raleigh was an Army Air Force cadet. But May's just been jilted by her fiancée, and Raleigh just washed out of flight school due to epilepsy. When Raleigh insists that Magnificent Obsession is a love story, May immediately views him as a backslider. Sure enough, what does Raleigh do but invite her to Corbin's annual Nibroc Festival. May has never been to the Nibroc Festival, believing it to be a pagan rite. Raleigh explains that "Nibroc," of course, is simply "Corbin" spelled backwards, which comes as a revelation to May. (For all her education, May is not " worldly"; in fact, the plot eventually hinges on her naiveté, in a rather charming way.) In the next scene, they both end up at the Nibroc Festival, although their lives have taken markedly sadder courses. And in the final scene, their lives have changed again: there's a war on, but love is the most threatening thing of all. (For all its naturalism, this is remarkably like a Padua Hills play in which onstage action responds to offstage events.) The Alabama-reared Hutton is a member of New Dramatists, and she has created some wonderful down-home characters in "Nibroc", in the style of Lanford Wilson. "Nibroc" has been performed across the country since its 1999 Off-Off-Broadway debut, and this production comes to us from Footprint on the Sun, a group of Duke University theater arts graduates who've landed in Los Angeles. Both Sanders and Saunders are Duke alumni, and exceptional young actors; I swore they were native Kentuckians imported via time machine from the 1940s. Under Jeff Storer's direction, they each beautifully convey the American personality of the period: the bright-faced sincerity, the constant courtesy, and the stifled desire. (Key Webb's costumes, too, go a long way toward authenticity.) "Last Train to Nibroc" is a lovely two-hander and a finely crafted portrait of an American time -- a time worth revisiting in a play such as this. Like a good Patsy Cline record, its politeness is its gateway to emotion.
"Last Train to Nibroc", thru April 14 at the Powerhouse
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