STAGE REVIEW : The Twain Meet Again in ‘Boys in Autumn’

It’s surprising that “The Boys in Autumn,” which dramatizes an adult reunion between Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer, isn’t a better-known play. It’s just now premiering here, at Los Angeles Art Theatre, and the production is flawless, with vivid and even sublime performances by Mark Lenard as Huck and Walter Koenig as Tom, meeting up for the first time in 50 years.

The two-character play, with Burt Lancaster and Kirk Douglas, folded in a pre-Broadway tryout in San Francisco in 1981 and had another short life five years later with George C. Scott and John Cullum on Broadway.

The play’s fanciful premise is certainly a lure for anyone smitten with Twain’s “Huckleberry Finn,” but others might be drawn to L.A. Art Theater because of the casting of “Star Trek” film-and-TV-series veterans Lenard (who played Spock’s father) and Koenig (navigator Chekov).

Trekkies at the theater line up for autographs that have nothing to do with “The Boys in Autumn.” But in the bargain they’re rewarded with a touching, sobering blast from our literary and romantic past.

Calvin Coolidge is President, and Huck and Tom have endured some dark times. Lenard’s Huck is an irascible, retired hardware salesman living on a bluff overlooking the Mississippi outside Hannibal, Mo. Tom is a flashy, light-stepping, ex-vaudevillian who comes looking for his childhood friend in a 1912 Model T Ford roadster (a super rendition that sputters on to the leafy stage in front of Huck’s wooden front porch).

These aging men might not be so interesting if we weren’t captives of Twain going in, but Lenard and Koenig live so thoroughly in the long shadow of Huck and Tom, and Allan Hunt’s direction is so pristine, that the production overwhelms the predictable sentiment in Bernard Sabath’s play.

The characters remain true to their boyhood origins--Huck always was an outsider and a moralist afraid he was going to Hell, and Tom always was a huckster and a hustler. That’s what they still are.

Huck even went to college and reluctantly joined civilization in that hardware store and married a woman named Cloud. And the enterprising Tom has been to prison. Sparks of guilt, resentment, and anger fly between the two before the inevitable reconciliation and the fishing pole image of a renewed journey on a raft Huck has kept hidden under his porch.

These are not doddering old men, and this is not a rose-colored reminiscence. But there is a warm lilt under Gordon Clark’s coppery lighting: a vaudeville hoofing sequence, choreographed by Toni Kaye, with Lenard awkwardly galumphing around the elfin Koenig.

Reality and fantasy seldom blend this well. Welcome back to the raft, Huck.

Coincidentally, if you’re a Huck and Tom freak and want the complete story, a straight dramatization of the novel “Huckleberry Finn” is currently playing at Theatricum Botanicum. What a double bill and what a nice summer for Twain.

At 11305 Magnolia Blvd., North Hollywood, Thursdays through Saturdays at 8, Sundays at 7, through Sept. 2. $15. (818) 763-3101.