Lone Star Causes Riots of Laughter

Sometimes it's hard to know what to expect from a play. How should the audience react? Be quiet? Participate? Feel happy? Shocked? With playwright James McClure's Lone Star, the answer is easy - laugh.

Simply stated, Lone Star is one of the funniest plays that has been produced at Oberlin in quite some time. What makes it particularly rewarding is that it becomes neither traditional theatrical farce nor simply a staged version of a bland television sitcom. The play does have a sort of Texan-Jerry Seinfeld in the character of Ray (junior Matt Van Winkle), who observes, "Did you ever notice how a Baby Ruth looks like a turd?"

Lone Star is the story of one long, dark night in Texas for Roy (senior Will Alexander), an aging Texas football star who has returned from "Vitnam" two years ago. Slowly getting drunk behind the local bar, he realizes that nothing in life stays the same. His saviors are his brother Ray and a geek cowboy named Cletus, who is nicknamed "Skeeter" (junior Gabriel Carleton-Barnes). It is a play chock-full of junk food, cars, backseat sex, fights, crickets and of course, beer.

The actors, directed adeptly by senior Chris Niebling, manage to portray clearly defined characters without resorting to cartoonish stereotypes. The accents are also impressive; Roy's jockish swagger and Ray's bumpkin-ish cornpone allow deeper facets of the characters to come through.

The play dragged in places, as when Roy repeatedly pretends to be an American soldier sneaking up on Ray's pretend Vietcong. This sight gag pays off in a rewarding punch line. Other sequences, such as when Roy narrates a trip to a city of ill repute, are crippling in their hilarity. Cletus' scenes provide nice counterpoint to the two other oddballs that inhabit McClure's story.

In some ways, the best description of Lone Star comes from one of Ray's lines: "What kind of moral can there be when someone hits you over the head with a hoe?" In other words, just sit back be amused; deeper things can be left to the classroom. With four performances, there's no reason not to see this immensely enjoyable production.