Midgets

By Gerald Clarke

COME BACK TO THE 5 & DIME, JIMMY DEAN, JIMMY DEAN by Ed Graczyk

As the curtain goes up, the theme from Dimitri Tiomkin's score for the movie Giant fills the theater, grand, swelling, as spacious as Texas. The irony is quickly apparent: the several women and one man who spend their time in the five and ten in McCarthy, Texas, are spiritual midgets, made small by life and their own tediously limited ambitions. But there is a double irony, invisible perhaps to those onstage: Playwright Ed Graczyk and Director Robert Altaian can also be counted among the Lilliputians, and it would take the talents of a logician to determine who should get the greater blame for this misguided effort.

The action shifts chaotically between two years, 1955 and 1975. In the earlier year Giant is shot near by, after which one of its stars, James Dean, dies in a car crash; in the latter the Disciples of James Dean, a group of local fans, are holding a 20th reunion. Mona (Sandy Dennis) and Sissy (Cher) are still clerking in Woolworth's, and Joanne (Karen Black), who had also worked there, returns to stir up old emotions.

Pictures of Dean are everywhere, and Mona seemingly has convinced everyone that her missing son--the Jimmy Dean of the title--was fathered by the cinematic god himself. "At that time he was our savior," she says. "He was the only one who understood us." The crumbling movie set has become a holy shrine to her, and from every visit she proudly bears back a fragment, like a pilgrim with a relic of the true cross.

Except for Dennis, who has been allowed to turn an interesting neurosis into unbearable monotony, the acting is polished. In her first time on Broadway, Cher proves herself a promising comedienne, but a still aspiring dramatic actress. Altman, however, has engineered the shifts between years with stunning incompetence, while Graczyk, the executive director of the Columbus Players Theater, has overloaded his 5 & Dime with enough junky symbolism to warrant an eviction notice. As each character is stripped of her life-sustaining illusion, it becomes obvious that though the setting is Texas, we are really in Ibsen's Norway. That sound at the end is not applause, but wild ducks flapping overhead, vainly trying to find a play on which they can comfortably land. --By Gerald Clarke

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