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'Jimmy Dean' brought back to the stage

'Jimmy Dean' brought back to the stage image
Parent Issue
Day
29
Month
July
Year
1987
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Donated by the Ann Arbor News. © The Ann Arbor News.
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'Jimmy Dean' brought back to the stage

By CHRISTOPHER POTTER

NEWS ARTS WRITER

'What (Robert) Altman did, to his credit and intelligence, was realize it was a better stage play than a movie.'
— Director David Hunsberger

Though it’s infinitely common for a hit Broadway play to do a belly-flop once it hits a movie screen, Ed Graczyk's "Come Back to the Five and Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean” pulled a heretical reversal some five years ago. Roasted by the New York theater critics, Graczyk’s bruised and battered nostalgia show suddenly found itself raved over - often by the same reviewers - when its movie version debuted some six months later.

“I don’t really understand (the switch in attitude),” admits director David Hunsberger, whose Desert Production Company staging of “Jimmy Dean” opens Thursday evening at Performance Network. Especially puzzling is the fact that the New York stage and movie versions both featured the same director, Robert Altman, plus largely the same cast, headed by Sandy Dennis, Cher and Karen Black.

“What Altman did, to his credit and intelligence,” offers Hunsberger, “was realize it was a better stage play than a movie. So he tried to film it as much like a stage play as possible.”

Certainly Graczyk’s self-styled “comedy-drama” is stagy to the nth degree. Invoking the familiar mode of nostalgic revelation, “Jimmy Dean” features the 20th reunion of the McCarthy, Texas, James Dean Fan Club — a band of now-middle-aged women who trek to the local dime store each Sept. 30th to mark the star’s tragic death.

It seems 20 years earlier (the play is set in 1975), the Dean-starring movie “Giant” had been filmed in the vicinity of McCarthy, and all the women had either played extras in the film or hung groupie-close to the glamorous goings-on. Now two decades removed, the experience remains the emotional zenith of the heroines’ dead-end, small-town existence, with their deceased idol now elevated to the level of a Christ figure.

During the course of one day’s “celebration,” pent-up hates and hurts are laid bare, skeletons come screaming out of closets (one returnee bears a whopper of a surprise), and emotional crutches are brutally stripped away. Thus cleansed, the battered protagonists find themselves better equipped to face their own lives minus pretense or sham.

While Hunsberger concedes Graczyk’s confrontation mode is as wheezy as they come, he likens “Jimmy Dean” to “a kind of female ‘Iceman Cometh,’ though not nearly as well-written. These women go through the same kind of capitulations regarding their own self-deceptions, which they’ve held for years.

“It’s a coming of age play, really. Everyone goes through some kind of change, or self-realization. These are people who’ve had nothing more to reflect on except this one important period in their lives. We find out about the hardships they’ve gone through since then: One lost her husband, one had a mastectomy, one maintains the fantasy that she met James Dean, had sex with him and that her kid is James Dean’s kid.

“The one fundamental thing in their lives was that they all loved James Dean. Yet the play’s not about James Dean; it’s about these women’s relationship to one another. Although the format’s cliched - people reveal this terribly personal stuff they know about each other, and really lay into each other — it’s also clear that they really love each other. You can tell that.”

“Jimmy Dean’s” Detroit-Ann Arbor cast includes Lori Brown, Alicia Harris, Laurie Johnson, Jonathan Katz, Maureen McGee, Sandra Storer and Maggie Wysocki. Though Hunsberger calls the show “an actors’ play,” he admits it’s not easy mastering Graczyk’s tricky mode of instantaneous timehopping between ’75 and ’55 — minus makeup and costume changes.

“The cast is more insecure about that than I am,” insists Hunsberger. “I really think they’re good enough actors that they could make the transition without any accompanying effects. But we will do some kind of light change every time there’s a time switch.

“Besides, people love to watch time-travel stuff in the first place. If we get it to work right, it will switch a lot like it did in (Altman’s) movie. To me it’s startling sometimes watching. I’d swear time really did change.”

'Jimmy Dean' cast members include (first row) Maggie Wysocki, left, and Lori Brown, right and (second row, left to right) Laurie Johnson, Alicia Harris, Jonathan Katz, Anne Stoll and Dawn England.

'Come Back to the Five and Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean' will play Thurs.-Sun. and Aug. 6-9 and Aug. 13-16 at Performance Network, 408 W. Washington. Curtain Thurs.-Sat. is 8 p.m.; Sunday at 6:30 p.m. For ticket information call 663-0681.