Del Shores' Sordid Lives, directed by Michael Dale Brown for The Costa Mesa Civic Playhouse, tells the enjoyable story of a whacked-out family whose dysfunctional relationship comes to a head after the death of its matriarch, though the word "matriarch" doesn't quite have the same panache as it does when it refers to Miss Ellie in the TV series "Dallas."
The story, magnificently realized, wonderfully acted, might be locally set with keen geographic precision but it's actually a metaphor for the universal status quo-ness of dysfunction. Here, to be normal would be to, well, be a freak. (Just look at Marilyn in the TV series The Munsters).
Set in a small Texas town with cross-shots to a New York apartment and a therapist's office, it's an impressive production: the gritty nature of the story, the various ways this idiosyncratic, to say the least, memorable family deals (or doesn't) with each other, and the set, which painstakingly, recreates the atmosphere of small town, small-minded Texas.
The clan has to deal with the ramifications of their Mama's death. She died because she had been carrying on in a hotel with G.W. Nethercott (Rusty Vance), a blubbering Vietnam vet with prosthetic legs. It seems that she got up in the middle of the might to go to the bathroom, tripped on the legs lying on the ground, and cracked her head on a radiator.
This alone could occasion a whole Jerry Springer show; it did occasion a theme song, written my Margot Rose and Beverly Nero, performed lovingly by cowgirl Laura Lindahl.
The performances are sensitive and nuanced; yes, nuanced in the way the actors and actresses portray bigoted, petty characters, sensitive in their ability to display what amounts to tenderness at a final scene memorial service that isn't so much dignified as unique.
Image-conscious eldest daughter Latrelle Williamson (Kay Richey) is in denial both about the circumstances surrounding her Mama's death ("She had a brain tumor which activated her lascivious tendencies") and the homosexuality of her son, Ty (Ryan Holihan), who chucked small town real life soap opera for TV soap operas (and 27 therapists) in New York.
The dead woman's sister, Sissy Hickey (Barbara Duncan Brown), who resembles Aunt Tillie in the Bewitched TV series, muses that she wouldn't have stopped smoking three days prior if she knew her sister was going to die. Noleta Heathercott (Leigh Anne Patterson) - wife of philandering G.W., daughter of dead Mama - and La Vonda Dupree (Norma Jean Riddick) go Thelma and Louise at the errant ways of men. Therapist Dr. Eve Bolinger (Jenny Lanning) doesn't so much want to heal (heal?) gay/transvestite Earl "Brother Boy" Ingram (Ron Grigsby) - a real Mama's boy - abandoned for decades in a psych ward, as get a book deal and appear on Oprah.
Who needs reality shows when you've got great fiction like this?