STAGE REVIEW : ‘BEST WISHES’ CHARACTERS RING TRUE

The first thing we notice as we walk into the handsome Gnu Theatre for Jeff Seymour’s staging of Bill Barker’s “Best Wishes” is Seymour’s set: stuffed sofas, colonial lamps, bric--a--brac everywhere, and upstage, a big, dusty porch. It’s Rockwell’s Kansas, but look--the paint out on the porch is chipping. The design details are astonishing, but they’re consonant with one of Barker’s central concerns, which is how things don’t always improve with age.

Just as astonishing is that “Best Wishes” is Barker’s first play. It’s a full--bodied, richly textured account of a family reuniting to bury Mama. Considering that she had 19 children (14 surviving), the turnout of six has to be disappointing. But everyone is sooo happy to see one another that it’s washed over. In fact, oldest brother Gil (John Bryant), who’s taking care of the funeral and the selling of Mama’s house, is aglow at the attendance. Everyone lives so far apart and all....

Dorie (Sharon Howard), however, is not amused. Not at the no--shows, not at the ways in which her siblings try to lighten the mood, and especially not at Elda (Ann Walker), urbane, swearing, sarcastic. Dorie’s homespun, sanctimonious ways couldn’t make her more different from Elda. Barker, we sense, is setting up a war.

He doesn’t, though, set up a single red herring, extraneous device, assaulting plot twist, nor write lines the characters wouldn’t speak. They are, in fact, almost novelistic in their totality (full but not exhausting) and, as with everything else here, uncannily well crafted. To be sure, this is a play to watch for its craft, not for new, shocking insights. Crystal (Mary--Margaret Lewis) is the closest Barker gets to an offbeat, askew character--probably why her cemetery stunt in Act II is the moment when believability is lost.

“Best Wishes” is otherwise as faithful to its subject--the ways a family releases the past for the present--as a play could be.

It is no small trick to engage us in yet another naturalistic family saga, let alone make us buy the vast numbers of Mama’s family. This is partly Barker’s achievement, but Seymour’s cast gives the play a living, breathing force that erases every faux pas. Most striking of all is how none of the characters (with the exception of Dona Hardy’s hilarious, surprising Fanny) are characters--that is, types. They are outwardly unremarkable. Yet, Walker, Lewis, Howard, Bryant, Charles Quertermous as the helpful Denny and Eve Brenner as the troubled Vera find the inner fire that generates each of their peculiar loves and hates. This is an ensemble you can go home with, even if the play reminds us that you can’t go home anymore.

There’s a conservative aesthetic at work here, but the evening’s reverberating quality more than suggests that such an aesthetic has its place. The short run is at 10426 Magnolia Blvd., Thursdays through Sundays, 8 p.m., Saturdays, 2 p.m., until Oct. 13 ((818)508--5344).