Back Porch

Reviewed by Deborah Klugman
Bluestem Productions at the Victory Theatre Center
Through July 9

RECOMMENDED

An old-timey small town in Kansas. A young person chafing at its limitations and longing to see the world. A handsome stranger of uncertain moral character who appears as a catalyst for change. These plot elements appear front and center in William Inge’s Pulitzer-prize-winning play, Picnic, and they’re appropriated with fair success by playwright Eric Anderson in his new play Back Porch, a gay love story that turns on one youth’s sexual awakening and his inauguration into the difficult choices maturity may usher in.

The time is 1955. Eighteen-year-old Gary (Isaac W. Jay) and his younger brother Del (Cody Lemmon) live with their widowed Dad, Barney (Karl Maschek), whose wife had passed away when Del was born. A bright kid from a family with limited funds, Gary has graduated from high school and is slated to attend, on a scholarship, the local teachers’ college in the fall. The idea doesn’t exactly thrill him; secretly, he dreams of being an actor, a fantasy that takes wing when a movie company arrives in town to shoot the film, Picnic, with William Holden and Kim Novak. While Gary fails to be cast as an extra (which devastates him), his kid brother Del gets the call. One day on the set Del meets a man named Bill Holman (Jordan Morgan) whom he mistakes for the star William Holden, and invites him to visit their home. Holman, Holden’s good-looking stunt double, takes him up on it and shows up one evening. He’s a man with plenty of charm and bedroom eyes that alight on Gary, who shyly, and then decisively, responds.

Directed by Kelie McIver, the play follows the short-term evolution of their attraction, all in the shadow of the stern gender precepts of mid-20^th century middle-America. At first the only person to notice anything outside the margin of social acceptability is Gary’s distant relative, Myron (Eric Zak) — but since he’s an obnoxious prig, no one pays much attention to his agitated finger-pointing. Later, Barney’s neighbor and good buddy Millard (Jonathan Fishman) catches Bill and Gary in a small, intimate moment, and their relationship becomes an issue.

One of this play’s strengths is that, in creating his characters, Anderson eschews formula; in Millard and Barney, he gives us people who act according to their conscience, rather than simply behaving as spokespersons for the social mores of their time.  It’s also to the playwright’s credit that the family unit which serves as backdrop to the love story is atypical for that era, with a dad who’s chosen to raise his children on his own.

In a role that is mostly that of an observer, Fishman delivers the production’s preeminent performance as a warm, caring and perceptive friend. Zak frequently steals center stage as the goody-goody puritanical Myron. Maschek’s low-key Barney displays, at the end, the acting chops he possesses but has kept under wraps for most of the play, given the character’s taciturn manner.  Morgan has the most challenging role as the enigmatic Bill: Is he a good guy or an exploiter? The charismatic Morgan captures aspects of both. Jay labors mightily to fashion the persona of a naïve youngster, but it’s not a guise that come naturally, and the production suffers for it. In the later scenes, where his Gary has lived a bit more, the actor is more successful.

On a tiny proscenium, designer Kenneth Klimak’s simple set, with a backdrop to the side suggesting a boundless sky, serves the story well, as do Carol Doehring’s lighting and Cinthia Nava’s sound. As to Molly Martin’s costumes, I had to wonder why Millard and Barney kept their ties on so much of the time they were lounging together on the back porch, out of the public eye.

Toward the end, the play leans, somewhat precipitously, into soap opera melodrama, but not so much as to obscure what’s likable about the story and the adept performances that bring it home.

Bluestem Productions at the Victory Theatre Center, 3326 W Victory Blvd, Burbank. Fri.-Sat., 8 pm, Sun., 4 pm; thru July 9. onstage411.com/BackPorch Running time: approximately two hours and 15 minutes with an intermission.