STAGE REVIEW : Long, Winding ‘Highway’ for Williams Legend

Not only could country music star Hank Williams write music, he could really write lyrics. And the special, powerfully poetic language of the poor and barely educated--North or South, black or white--sooner or later found its way into his songs.

The same may be said of the Mark Taper Forum’s final show of the season, which originated at the Denver Center Theatre Company and was seen Wednesday at the final preview.

“Lost Highway,” subtitled “The Music and Legend of Hank Williams,” offers cowboy imagery that comes early and stays late--phrases such as “legs no bigger ‘round than a buggy whip” or “Skeet, you so skinny, you could change clothes in the barrel of a shotgun.”

Authors Randal Myler and Mark Harelik (who last year brought us “The Immigrant”) have an ear for this true coin of the realm. It’s picturesque stuff that works well in the telling of the Williams legend--that of a man who rose from poverty to the pinnacle of his profession in three spectacular years while his life drowned in a morass of alcohol, pills and marital troubles.

Williams died at 29, in the back seat of his car, while being driven to a singing date in Ohio. Heart attack was the official cause, but it was life attack: Too much, too fast, in a typically (tragically) American case of premature burnout.

The play as presented at the Taper rightly insists on this dark undertow. It is punctuated by the amazing presence of Ron Taylor, a very large man with a very large voice and the sweetness of honey in it. He plays Williams’ mentor, a street singer named Tee-Tot--a roving presence in the play, but its conscience just the same. His a cappella rendition of “The Blood Done Sign My Name” is human expression at its most exalted--an extraordinary moment.

“Lost Highway’s” Williams is played by Harelik himself, an accomplished, always appealing actor who has the vocal patterns and yodeling of the man he impersonates down pat. But Williams the man is another matter. He was a creature more inward and complicated than the one we perceive here, not because Harelik can’t deliver, but because of the format of the play, which suffers from a mild identity crisis.

Even though it’s been in the works on and off for at least a half-dozen years, its creators still haven’t decided what it should be: Concert or play? Sunny or dark? How sunny, how dark? As a result, “Lost Highway” swings from one to the other, often arbitrarily, diluting both moods and trying to pick up the sag in dramatic tension with too many songs.

Nowhere is this more evident than in the final moments when Williams, after a sequence of brooding scenes (the show begins and ends with his death), bounds back on stage in resplendent white jacket dotted with solfege , to give us one last gleaming song (“I Saw the Light”)--then leaves as his manager, in a rather stagey tableau, receives the fatal phone call.

It’s a fussy double-ending that could be simplified. If Myler and Harelik wanted to be really brave, they could end the piece on the earlier dark notes, forgetting the finale altogether. It would mean a tougher finish, but a truer one.

In terms of acting, direction (by Myler) and sheer abundance of individual talent, the production is impressive. Chic Street Man as a Tee-Tot sidekick makes sensational music on the washboard. As laconic band member Leon (Loudmouth), Dan Wheetman, a Jimmy Stewart type, is a knockout on the fiddle, banjo, harmonica and, yes, spoons. Molly McClure’s Mama Lilly relishes the raw pragmatism of a woman accustomed to speaking her mind, and Richard McKenzie gives zest and dimension to the underwritten role of Pap, Williams’ empathic manager.

Much the same goes for Jamie Horton (Burrhead) and Mick Regan (Hoss) as Williams’ friends and fellow musicians in succinct and understated portraits.

Richard L. Hay has provided an effective unit set, sensitively lit by Martin Aronstein, and Andrew Yelusich has dressed everyone in richly appropriate, often gaudy costumes, making sure that Harelik’s jackets are a little too loose for his frame to emphasize Williams’ reputation for being skinny.

Cassie Yates as Williams’ pretty but untalented wife, Audrey (“She’d have to sneak up on a song before she could sing it”), and Stephanie Dunnam as the waitress he eventually makes off with (his second wife?) have a harder time filling out superficially etched characters. However, Yates, described as able to “melt the wax off a Dixie cup at 50 feet,” manages that part of the portrait, and we believe Dunnam when she says of herself, “Don’t think there’s nothin’ there but an all-night hair-do.”

Yes, ma’am. Great lines. And yet “Lost Highway,” for all of its singular merits, tends to lose its collective way. At 2 1/2 hours with an intermission, it overstays its welcome, particularly in the first half. And while it doesn’t lapse into lecture demonstration, neither does it sufficiently escape the pitfalls and show-and-tell constraints of biographical theater. It could dispense with some of the 21 Williams songs. Too many for a play that also wants to tell us about the man.

Performances run Tuesdays through Saturdays, 8 p.m.; Sundays, 7:30 p.m. ; matinees Saturdays and Sundays, 2:30 p.m. Ends Aug. 21. Tickets: $19-$25; (213) 410-1062 or TDD (213) 680-4017.

‘LOST HIGHWAY’

A play by Randal Myler and Mark Harelik presented by the Mark Taper Forum. Director Randal Myler. Set design Richard L. Hay. Lighting design Martin Aronstein. Costumes Andrew Yelusich. Musical co-ordination Harelik and Dan Wheetman. Voice-over Hugh Cherry. Sound Jon Gottlieb, Dick Jenkins, John E. Pryor. Production stage manager James T. McDermott. Stage manager Mary K. Klinger. Cast Harelik, Wheetman. Ron Taylor, Tony Matthews, Chic Street Man, Stephanie Dunnam, Mick Regan, Jamie Horton, Molly McClure, Richard McKenzie, Cassie Yates.