THEATER REVIEW : Heehaw Instead of Heart

Preston Jones’ “The Last Meeting of the Knights of the White Magnolia” is one-third of the play wright’s “Texas Trilogy,” which admits that the stars at night are big and bright but concedes that they don’t shed too much light deep in the heart of Texas.

Jones’ plays last because he was able to say some rather dark things about the people he knew, and make them chuckle at the same time. “Last Meeting” takes place on the terminal evening of the Bradleyville, Tex., chapter of a lodge that was formed as a milder version of the Ku Klux Klan. From several hundred lodges throughout Texas and Oklahoma, this movement has dwindled in 1962 to this last forlorn, bedraggled outpost.

There is a lot of humor in the play, but it’s only there to help the social comment go down easier. The mistake that director Nance Crawford makes in this Woodland Hills Community Theatre production is not trusting Jones’ gentle humor to do the trick. She finds it necessary to put funny on top of amusing, and treats most of the play as though it were a “Hee Haw” sketch, with caricatures of the lodge members rather than the honest characters who display Jones’ humor naturally.

What it does to the play is knock it irrevocably out of balance. When Jones, and the play, get very serious at the end of Act II, there has been no preparation for the change. From knee-slapping yuks to bitter revelation of racism is a dramatic wrench and a theatrical disaster.

The cast is surely capable of finding the heart instead of the heehaw in Jones’ writing. Norman Igar and Jim Miller as two flannel-mouthed idiots who love cribbage, Jon Berry as the almighty lodge Wizard, David Stifel as the doddering colonel who owns the hotel where the lodge meets, James “Duey” DuHaime as a young initiate, and Craig Duswalt as a late-coming member, could all look better with more insightful guidance.

Glenn Morshower, as the meanest of the members, JoRae McNeal as the lodge’s good ol’ boy drunk, and especially Kenneth Kidd as the wise black hotel janitor Ramsey-Eyes, all manage to hold onto an image of some reality and honesty, and Jones’ insights often work through them.

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WHERE AND WHEN

What: “The Last Meeting of the Knights of the White Magnolia.”

Location: Woodland Hills Community Theatre, 22700 Sherman Way, West Hills.

Hours: 8 p.m. Fridays and Saturdays. 2:30 p.m. this Sunday only. Ends June 3.

Price: $15 general, $13 seniors and students.

Call: (818) 884-1907.