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New West Theater Review

Holt Prairie Saga Continues in “Eventide”

By Jenny Shank, 2-09-10

This month the Denver Center for the Performing Arts is presenting the world premier of “Eventide,” playwright Eric Schmiedl’s faithful adaptation of Kent Haruf’s novel, directed by Kent Thompson.  Two years ago Schmiedl turned Haruf’s beloved novel Plainsong into a winning play, and this time he works with darker material, but nevertheless manages to reveal the abundant humor in Haruf’s dialogue.

“Plainsong” told the story of the McPheron brothers, two old bachelor ranchers living on the outskirts of the fictional prairie town of Holt, Colorado, coaxed into sheltering a pregnant teenage girl, Victoria Roubideaux, who had been thrown out by her mother.  They formed a strong, improvised family, and “Eventide” picks up on their lives a few years later, when Victoria’s daughter Katie is two years old, and the McPheron brothers are reluctantly preparing to see them off to Fort Collins, where Victoria will attend college. 

Philip Pleasants and Mike Hartman return to reprise the roles of Harold and Raymond McPheron, respectively, that they played in “Plainsong,” and they once again prove irresistible, two elderly rural gentlemen adept in cattle rearing chores but startled by modern life, unaccustomed to dancing, socializing, and fielding the amorous advances of women.  Their interaction and dialogue, which closely follows that in Haruf’s novel, is hilarious.

The biggest laugh in the play comes when Raymond McPheron takes social worker Rose Tyler (played with heart and grit by Lauren Klein) out to dinner at a restaurant that turns out to be crowded.  “It’s kind of late to be eating supper…It’s getting awful close to seven-thirty,” Raymond remarks.  “You wouldn’t do well in New York or Paris, would you,” Rose says.  Raymond stares at her and replies, “I wouldn’t even do very good in Fort Morgan.”

The set, with its prairie sky backdrop, suggests how greatly the landscape influences the people in this town, even when they are indoors.  Schmiedl’s technique of having the townspeople take turns as narrators, standing on different corners of the stage and speaking passages of the novel’s honed prose, is equally as effective in “Eventide” as it was in “Plainsong,” recalling how intertwined the lives in a small town are, and how anybody’s business becomes everybody’s business in a place like Holt.  (As Raymond McPheron remarks at one point when someone brings up how he and his brother took in a pregnant teenager, “it was kind of hot news for a while, I guess.")

As in “Plainsong,” several other stories taking place simultaneously in Holt intersect with the main narrative.  Perhaps the most striking aspect of “Eventide” is how it foregrounds the sort of people who are kept offstage in most forms of American entertainment.  The opening act introduces Betty June and Luther Wallace, an overweight, mentally deficient couple who live in an unkempt trailer with their two children.  The Wallaces try to stay on the right track, hoping to avoid having their children sent to foster care, as was Betty June’s older daughter, but they run into trouble when Betty June’s cocksure, belligerent uncle turns up at the trailer and demands they let him stay.

And we meet Walter Kephart, the elderly caretaker of his orphaned grandson, in bed suffering from what turns out to be pneumonia.  Elderly, infirm, or impoverished adults and the children who depend on and care for them are at the center of “Eventide,” as is the death of a main character.  It’s a focus on a side of human experience that recalls the work of Steinbeck, and it seems an apt one during our country’s current hard times.

Still, it’s not for everybody.  In the lobby during the first intermission, a carefully-preserved middle-aged woman whose dress revealed her tanned shoulders called home on her cell phone to speak with her child.  When asked what she thought of the play, she said, “Daddy likes it.  It’s his sort of thing.” Those who prefer escapism to realism will probably find it in “Legally Blonde: The Musical,” also playing at the DCPA this month.

But those who embrace realism as a way to reflect on life as it’s actually lived will find plenty to enjoy in “Eventide.” The story arc of “Eventide” is less uplifting than that of “Plainsong”; “Plainsong” ended with a birth that brought a family together, “Eventide” ends with a family that must be torn apart.  But with its humor, fine performances, and a touching depiction of a late blooming romance, “Eventide” offers consolations for its darker turns.

“Eventide” runs through February 27 at the Stage Theatre in the Denver Center for the Performing Arts, Monday through Saturday.  Tickets start at $18.

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