THEATER REVIEW : ‘Boys’ Catches Up With Older Tom, Huck

Revisiting Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn later in life is a premise loaded with innate appeal, but like many an attempt to put a new spin on familiar legend, Bernard Sabath’s “The Boys in Autumn” founders on the flip side of its own conceit--the built-in expectations that go along with archetypes.

Tom and Huck were Mark Twain’s enduring invocations of boyhood on the banks of the Mississippi in the 1880s. But as the Santa Susana Repertory Company revival of “Boys” at the Thousand Oaks Civic Arts Plaza makes clear from the outset, Sabath is no Mark Twain--this reunion of the onetime friends after a 40-year separation lacks both the comic inventiveness and the crisp dialogue that made classics of the original stories.

Its perspective is radically altered as well. Where Twain used Tom and especially Huck to view society from a point of view untainted by its foibles and hypocrisies, Sabath’s gaze has turned inward. Exploring the changes wrought in their personalities through the inevitable process of growing up, the play allows its Prohibition Era context to intrude only in slivers, usually as a corrupting influence.

These changes are glaringly evident in Huck (Mark Lenard), now transformed into the respectable if reclusive Henry Finnegan, whose onetime aversion to becoming “civilized” has given way to a rigid, almost pathological conservatism.

“Civilization is a powerful thing” is the only explanation he offers when Tom (Walter Koenig) fails to recognize him.

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Tom isn’t the only one. In seeking to avoid the obvious choice--making Huck an extension of his familiar rebel self--the play posits a complete reversal that’s no more satisfying. While the grounds for Huck’s altered philosophy emerge much later, the audience must struggle in the meantime to reconcile this sourpuss with the untamed hedonist of old.

After a painfully protracted tour of Tom’s career in vaudeville, the two performers get down to doing what they do best--acknowledging their characters’ histories and putting out tentative feelers to rekindle their friendship.

But even here, script limitations work against them. Conflict--well, more of a spat, actually--emerges only as a device to bridge the intermission, where it’s promptly and unforgivably resolved without insight.

Only in the second-half confessionals do Huck and Tom make a viable claim on our attention, particularly in Lenard’s heartfelt narration about the death of Huck’s wife and the betrayal of his principles for which he can never atone. An unsavory revelation about Tom darkens his legend even more.

The rustic cabin set by Roger C. Ambrose adds its share of bucolic charm, but Allan Hunt’s staging doesn’t always play to his performers’ strengths (flashbacks requiring them to sprint to center stage, kneel and pretend to be boys are almost cruelly unflattering).

Having dragged their characters through enough mud to fill the Mississippi Delta, the play expects us to buy Huck and Tom’s revived youthful innocence, an unearned renewal achieved through the all but effortless recitation of their stories--again, without insight.

It’s a lot to swallow--on par with Tom’s tall tales in days gone by.

* “The Boys in Autumn,” Thousand Oaks Civic Arts Plaza Forum Theatre, 2100 E. Thousand Oaks Blvd., Thousand Oaks. Friday, Saturday, 8:30 p.m. Ends Saturday. $17.50. (805) 449-2787. Running time: 2 hours, 5 minutes.