Reminiscences told with a country twang

Late at night, a teenage boy shoots hoops in his West Texas backyard. The perils of his advanced era -- the 1950s -- are swirling through his mind, communists, atomic bombs and flying saucers colliding with such everyday fears as losing his parents.

He makes a basket. The backboard erupts in a mushroom cloud. Yet the air is filled with music -- a gentle country lullaby.

This is the framework for Terry Allen’s semiautobiographical “Dugout III: Warboy (and the backboard blues),” which tonight concludes a three-performance run at REDCAT. The piece is part of a project that the Santa Fe-based visual artist and musician has been developing for more than a decade. Los Angeles saw and heard much of it last year in a blowout multi-venue presentation of the visual components “Dugout I” and “Dugout II” and L.A. Theatre Works’ radio presentation of “Dugout III.” At REDCAT, Allen’s actress wife, Jo Harvey Allen, helps him to tell the latter story on a stage set with simple yet evocative environments while screens glow with artful video footage and Allen’s country-folk trio twangs along in the background.

Told mostly in third person, with Allen and Harvey Allen occasionally slipping into character, the story fast-forwards and rewinds, out of order, through the 1940s and ‘50s. The situation is roughly Allen’s own. Born in 1943 to a former pro baseball player and a onetime honky-tonk piano player, he grew up hearing their stories, as well as those of other old ballplayers and musicians who showed up at the house.

Envisioning himself “ugly and not very athletic,” the young protagonist longs to be extraordinary, perhaps in sports, perhaps on the battlefield, like the heroes in the Korean War/Cold War-era movies he sees.

Allen delivers segments of narrative from his position at a keyboard to one side of the playing area, where he also sings and sends his fingers dancing along the keys in the company of guitarist Lloyd Maines and fiddler Richard Bowden. Harvey Allen, dressed in simple black pantsuit and matching Converse hightops, occupies the stage environments: the basketball hoop, a living room and an all-purpose picnic table. The corners of her mouth are perpetually upturned. She enjoys this yarn and invites the audience to do the same.

Allen’s music -- which underscores the story and occasionally develops into full-blown songs -- sounds like old times, each piece seeming familiar even at first hearing.

The wry, witty, poetic strands of narrative function as parables. The father develops cancer; the mother gets moody and disappears for days at a time.

On projection screens, the world disintegrates in nuclear blasts, gets overwhelmed by floodwater, is invaded by spaceships or is plunged into battle.

Yet the family finds peace, as when the mother takes hold of the father’s hand and “her fingers move lightly over his big knuckles like she is playing the piano.”

“He feels himself suddenly come loose and fly out in a great high and familiar arc. And in some infinite and secret place, she flies away with him.”

And deep down, the boy senses he is safe.

*

‘Dugout III’

Where: REDCAT, 2nd and Hope streets, Los Angeles

When: 8:30 tonight

Price: $32

Contact: (213) 237-2800 or www.redcat.org

Running time: 1 hour, 15 minutes