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Father, Son & Holy Coach
Reviewed by Pauline Adamek
Whitefire Theatre
Through Aug. 30
It’s a little difficult to get a fix on writer-performer John Posey’s solo show Father, Son & Holy Coach, which first premiered in 1993 at The Santa Monica Playhouse. Is it a true story? Is it about a real person? No and yes (I think). Although voicing numerous characters throughout the episodic piece, Posey narrates from the perspective of the central character Johnny Sandford, a small town football hero during the 1980s. The setting is a tight-knit Southern town in Tupelo County, Georgia, where “football was more of a life here – it was a religion.”
While the milieu is football, the gently humorous one-act play is more so an exploration of a father-son relationship that our protagonist ultimately finds deficient. It’s a fairly familiar homespun tale of a man determined to live his dreams through his son, in this case coaching and propelling the boy towards a pro football career at all costs.
Throughout Posey addresses us directly as Johnny, frequently slipping into different characters such as his gruff father and coach Ed, who lectures his son using pithy stories that all end with “Are we clear?” The show is punctuated with bursts of a radio broadcast, “Radio Sports Line,” with Posey sometimes voicing the amiable radio announcer Wally, and at other times voicing the various colorful characters who call in to the show. (The opposite side of the dialogue is pre-recorded.) It’s a good way to break up the narration, as is the projected slides and a snippet of televised footage towards the end, specifically of Sandford during a climactic moment in an important match – which implies he must have existed.
Story-wise, Posey could do a better job of tugging at our heartstrings here and there, and the episodic show, while only clocking in at 75 minutes, feels longer seeing as it progresses at a country town pace. Curiously, Mom is virtually absent from the story, rating only a single segment where she is described as someone who stays on the periphery and expresses herself only through needlepoint samplers.
Posey uses physical gestures and grimaces to inject humor. Also Posey’s physicality suggests he was a sports player for much of his youth, so there’s a sense that some of his own personal experiences have made it into this play, whether it’s about a fictional character or not.
It’s a sweet story, but the show, with its persistent football-as-a- metaphor-for-life theme, might drag for those indifferent to the pigskin.
Whitefire Theatre, 13500 Ventura Blvd., Sherman Oaks; Fri., 8 p.m.; Sun., 3 p.m.; through Aug. 30. (800) 838-3006,www.fshc.brownpapertickets.com
