STAGE REVIEW : Front-Porch Swings in Baker’s ‘Rain’

Ah, those long evenings on the old front porch, with everybody tearing each other to bits. It’s how families used to entertain themselves before television. Some families still do.

Jamie Baker’s “South Central Rain,” at the Tamarind Theater, is set in Louisville circa 1974. It concerns the clan we first met in Baker’s “Don’t Go Back to Rockville” (still running at the Victory Theatre). Remember Ed, the sullen training jockey at Churchill Downs who got suspended in 1944 for trying to tamper with the Kentucky Derby?

Well, old Ed produced a family, and here they are, 30 years later, just as mean as Ed was. (They have recently buried him.) “We take care of our own” is their motto, as in “I’ll take care of you , don’t worry.”

The question of the play is: Will grandson Danny (David Officer) and his just-divorced Mom (Catherine Telford) actually get to leave for California in the morning, or will the relatives cook up some scheme to keep them in town?

The ending won’t be revealed, but everybody gets what is coming to them, especially Danny’s father (Scott Lincoln), who actually deserves worse.

But this isn’t one of those autobiographical plays where the author gets back at his relatives for not having been nicer to him as a kid. Baker doesn’t waste any sympathy on this crowd, but neither does he turn them into the Jukes and the Kalikaks.

In fact, at a distance, he can see how funny those front-porch conversations were:

“Well, we won’t go into YOUR past.”

“I USED to look up to you.”

“Whose fault was THAT, I wonder?”

Snip, snip, snip. But Ed’s family isn’t always cutting each other down to size. For instance, there’s the moment when Danny and his cousin Wendy (Betsy Klingelhoefer) realize that if anything is going to happen between them, it had better happen tonight. That really does give the family something to talk about in the morning.

“South Central Rain” is an entertaining play, and an honest one. Playwright Baker realizes that some of his characters may look like cartoons, especially to Northern eyes. But this is how they were, and he’s not going to slick them up.

We believe them. We can even see how Danny is going to miss his relatives when he gets to California. There’s certainly nothing plastic about them. They’ll say anything to each other. “That’s just the way we are when we get together.”

Danny narrates the play, meanwhile walking around in it, not letting his relatives know that they have become figures in his past. At the same time, he is fully back there with them, a teen-ager with the usual resentments and an unusual sense of responsibility. If this sounds complicated, actor David Officer as Danny makes it look simple. He just goes out and lives in the story.

They all do. If there’s one thing that American actors are good at, it’s the down-home family play. Everybody in Victor Pappas’ Pacific Theatre Ensemble cast comes onto that front porch from someplace, and leaves it for someplace.

Everybody also finds a good word to say for his character. Easily the meanest person in the play is Danny’s father, a beer-swigging jerk whose idea of fun is making his sons flinch.

But actor Scott Lincoln shows us that Kenny, the father, does feel a kind of animal affection for the kids, at least for Danny’s brother, Carey (Daren Modder.) It’s not enough to excuse Kenny, but it does keep us from writing him off completely.

Similarly, actress Marilyn Fox makes us see why Danny’s Aunt Roberta is being so bitchy about having to become her mother’s legal guardian. She’s scared to death of the responsibility.

Catherine Telford as Danny’s mother is made of sterner stuff, and you admire her resolution in the face of the nastiest tactics that her husband can throw at her, including a near-rape.

Line-item descriptions of this ensemble won’t do, however. They’re all Ed’s kin, raised to believe that there’s only one crust of love left in the house, for which they must scrap. As we saw in “Don’t Go Back to Rockville,” that’s how Ed was raised himself.

The design is as true as the acting. All we see is a section of the front of the porch and the dirt front yard. But we sense an overhang of big soot-dropping trees. Thomas Buderwitz designed the set; Nicholas Hassitt designed the lighting, and Rhonda Earick went to Zody’s for the costumes.

P.S. There’s no rain in “South Central Rain,” just as there wasn’t any Rockville in “Don’t Go Back to Rockville.” Playwright Baker took his titles from songs by a Southern rock group called R.E.M. The mood just seemed to fit the characters.

Plays Thursdays-Saturdays at 8:30 p.m., Sundays at 7:30. Tickets $10-$15. Closes Dec. 18. 5919 Franklin Ave., three blocks east of Gower. (213) 466-1767.

‘SOUTH CENTRAL RAIN’

Jamie Baker’s play, at the Tamarind Theatre. Presented by the Pacific Theatre Ensemble and the Tamarind Theatre. Director Victor Pappas. Set designer Thomas Buderwitz. Costume designer Rhonda Earick. Lighting designer Nicholas Hassitt. With David Officer, Betsy Klingelhoefer, Darren Modder, Joseph Olivieri, Scott Lincoln, Tom Poindexter, Catherine Telford, Michael Becker, David Gilmore, Harry Herman, Melissa Weber, Marilyn Fox, Linda Lodge.