The Malibu Stage Company’s newest play, “The Oldest Living Graduate,” opened last weekend with a strong cast and elaborate set design.
By Hank Pollard / Special to The Malibu Times
The Malibu Stage Company is concluding its 2011-12 repertory season in grand style with the late Preston Jones’ “The Oldest Living Graduate,” which opened last weekend. With tart dialogue and splashes of humor, “Graduate” deals with the conflict between the passing generation and the current one, and does it quite well.
The setting is 1962, in a ranch house on the West Texas prairie. Colonel J. C. Kincade (played by Howard “Hub” Ferguson-Woitzman), is the only living graduate from the 1906 class of the Mireabeau B. Lamar Military Academy, the academy’s first graduating class.
The wheelchair-bound colonel is a curmudgeon of the highest order, feisty and irascible, but beneath his crusty exterior beats a heart full of tender memories. When the colonel’s underachieving son, Floyd (Tom Sean Foley), proposes to his father that they develop lake-front property on the ranch into vacation homes, the colonel refuses because of his memories of the happy days of his youth romancing and fishing on the lake.
Floyd’s plain-speaking, hard-drinking wife, Maureen (Colette Kilroy), is torn: she wants her husband to succeed in his venture but is reluctant to thwart the old man. Also involved in the real estate project is Floyd’s bloviating business partner Clarence (Howard Rosen), whose redneck crassness is amusingly paired with his pretty, airhead of a wife (Katharine Everett). Maureen often clashes with Clarence and his airs of self-importance, and she deploys a full arsenal of homespun, West Texas profanity to cut him down to size. Claudine Hampton appears in the second act as a nurse patiently trying to cope with the colonel.
Things come to a head when the commandant of the Military Academy (Darren Kelly) approaches the colonel with an idea for a celebration to be attended by local and state dignitaries in honor of the colonel’s longevity.
Floyd sees the occasion as an opportunity to promote investors for his real estate project. But the event quickly slides off the rails.
In a poignant and hilarious scene, the pompous, be-medaled commandant and his ramrod-straight aide (Kevin Allesee) pitch the proposal. But the colonel, put off by the manners of his visitors, rambles about his experiences in World War I and the Pancho Villa days. Finally he declares, “Go to hell with your military attitude. You weren’t there!” and abruptly calls the event off.
While the play features strong performances across the board, Hub Ferguson’s Colonel J. C. Kincade is particularly dynamic. He projects anger that his memories are vanishing, but he steadfastly insists on hanging on to the bits of his past he can remember, such as his idyllic days on the lake property that Floyd wants to sell. He is an old soldier who is unwilling to fade away. Hub, who is known to many in the area as “The Handyman of Malibu,” inhabits the role of the colonel as if it had been written for him. Nancy Marie Little, the play’s director and a founding member of MSC, has obtained excellent performances from her large cast.
The set designed by Kelly H’Doublier-Crowder deserves special note. It fully occupies the MSC’s stage and appears to be an authentic replica of a 1960s West Texas ranch house, with its clapboard walls, western artifacts and wagon wheel chandelier. It is spacious enough to allow the colonel and others to navigate his wheel chair comfortably.
Between scenes, western music of the period is heard with good effect. There is an entr’acte interlude in which Truce Kai strums and sings a haunting guitar solo that he composed that sets the mood for the balance of the play. Kai does double duty as a ranch hand and friend and confidante of the colonel whose father fished with the colonel on the lake in his younger days.
“The Oldest Living Graduate” will have performances on Fridays and Saturdays at 8 p.m. and Sundays at 5 p.m. through May 20. Tickets are $25, Seniors $15, and can be obtained by calling 310.589.1998.