Small Town: No Way Out

The company of Ogunquit's Small Town. (Photo: Gary Ng.)

Klara Zieglerova’s scenic design for the new John Mellencamp jukebox musical Small Town (at the Ogunquit Playhouse through November 1) is lovely. It’s layered and has a bright, varied palette, and it gives the director, Lisa Peterson, the choreographer, Richard J. Hinds, and the cast of twenty-three many kinds of space to cover. It even includes a downstage bridge that descends into fire-escape staircases.

Unhappily, the show it serves lacks both color and depth. The singers can vocalize but the music director, Jason Hart, has everyone belting. The dancers are extraordinary but the choreography is aggressive and joyless. Naomi Wallace’s script is a collection of clichés that doubles up on the effect of the belting and the dancing: it just keeps shoving and punching at the audience. By the end of three hours I felt like I’d been laid out.

The setting is a small town in the American heartland in the eighties that was once productive farmland, but the farms have stopped supporting the locals, and there’s no future for the young people spinning out of high school but to go to work at the plant owned by the only wealthy man in town, Sean (Ron Bohmer). The one kid who manages to get out is Sean’s son Jack (Dillon Klena), whom he has sent east to college with the instruction not to return until the summer. But Jack has to leave his girlfriend Diane (Morgan Higgins) behind, and long distance seems to weaken their connection. When he disobeys his father’s dictum and sneaks back in town for the weekend, he finds Diane worn down by the job she’s taken working for Sean, replacing her ailing father Sergio (Matt Saldívar) so that her family – which includes her mother Maria (Luna Lauren Velez), who cleans houses, and her sister Octavia (Kendall Rivera), who’s still in high school – can keep going. Jack also discovers that his dad has been dumping industrial waste in the local creek that furnishes the town’s water. Apparently Jack’s mother, who died at some unspecified time, was a casualty of the industrial poison, and Sergio’s illness (also unspecified) is the latest consequence. It’s mysterious that more of the townspeople haven’t succumbed, but Wallace isn’t sharp on detail, and the plot doesn’t quite add up. She is more interested in big melodramatic scenes and in pushing through her undifferentiated cardboard narrative about a community at the edge of despair that somehow turns out, by final curtain, into a community galvanized by hope.

Sean isn’t just a villain; he’s monstrous enough for half a dozen baddies. (We seem meant to read him as racist through his dismissal of his son’s girlfriend as a tramp, even though Sean himself has been carrying a torch for Maria.) There’s probably nothing an actor can do to salvage this character, but Bohmer doesn’t help by playing him as a cartoon. We hate this guy the moment he shows up, sneering and making every word out of his mouth sound like a threat. On the other hand, we’re supposed to love Jack, but Klena is also unappealing – he makes a lot of faces and performs every one of his songs (and he has many, and they sound similar) like a self-conscious lead singer in a novice rock ‘n’ roll band. Higgins is better as Diane, but I didn’t believe in their relationship, and she’s the singer who suffers most from the show’s belting epidemic. One fears for her vocal health.

Kathy Fitzgerald and Annie Golden work hard to bring some charm to the roles of the farming partners (Fitzgerald’s character is Jack’s aunt) whose secret romantic relationship is so obvious that you can’t imagine anyone in this underpopulated town hasn’t figured it out, though they don’t declare their love until minutes before the end of the musical. Rivera isn’t bad as Diane’s prodigy kid sister, but she has to struggle against a silly character “touch”: Octavia walks around with a notebook in which she writes down as “facts” her observations of her family and neighbors, which is really just a playwright’s device to dot the script with thematic pronouncements. Small Town is supposed to be dripping with soul, but Mellencamp’s music and lyrics are shy on it – and on lyricism. The only two cast members who supply any are Saldívar and Velez – especially the charismatic Saldívar. Sergio bows out of the story halfway through the show, but Wallace was smart enough to keep him around as a friendly ghost. These two are the only performers I wanted to see and hear more of.

– Steve Vineberg is Distinguished Professor of the Arts and Humanities at College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Massachusetts, where he teaches theatre and film. He also writes for The Threepenny Review and is the author of three books: Method Actors: Three Generations of an American Acting Style; No Surprises, Please: Movies in the Reagan Decade; and High Comedy in American Movies.