'Tobacco Road' a compelling trip to another world

The dark humor and impoverished country setting in 'Tobacco Road' seem to have anticipated Sam Shepherd's 'Buried Child' by about half a century.

'Tobacco' by Jack Kirkland, based on the novel Erskine Caldwell, ran for eight years on Broadway in the 1930s and is not likely to be fully staged here. So it's a special opportunity to have it read onstage at Army Community Theatre.

Adapted and directed by Vanita Rae Smith, this readers' theater performance cuts some of the peripheral characters and, with some careful editing and doubling up, is staged with a cast of five. Seated in chairs and reading from scripts, but using some very effective techniques, the cast stimulates audience imagination to fill in the missing parts and create a full stage picture.

That's no small task for a physical story line that calls for fighting, fondling and crawling on hands and knees. Accomplishing this, it's fairly easy for one actor to read the parts of two characters in the same scene and another to crash an automobile and carry on the broken pieces.

The action takes place on the dilapidated front porch and yard of impoverished sharecropper Jeeter Lester (read by Russell Motter). The land was played out years earlier by abuse and neglect, and Jeeter has been going deeper in debt with vague plans to raise a cotton crop. Mostly, he steals from the neighbors and avoids anything resembling work.

Jeeter's wife, Ada (Sylvia Hormann-Alper), has produced 17 children, most of them Jeeter's, and holds off fatigue and illness with a highly developed stubborn streak. Their elder children have married or run off. The last two remaining are Ellie May (also read by Hormann-Alper) - sexually overcharged and with a hare lip - and 16-year-old Dude (Richard Pellett), a crass youngster who uses his grandmother for a baseball target.

Neighbor Lov Bensey complains that the Lesters' daughter Pearl has not performed her wifely duties and now has run away to the city. Widowed evangelist preacher Sister Bessie Rice (Shari Lynn) has God's approval to make Dude her next husband, and the boy is willing, provided he gets to drive her car.

If this weren't enough domestic trouble, a new landowner will evict them unless Jeeter comes up with $100 in rent by morning.

In the world of the play, time is spent starving, fornicating and praising the lord; women are bought and sold, fight off incest, and marry at age 12. Wants are simple: Jeeter wants to remain attached to the farm, Ada wants to be buried in a nice dress, and Pearl (also read by Lynn) simply wants her husband to leave her alone.

Excellent readings make the action acceptable. Motter has the right twang and twisted yearnings to bring Jeeter to life. Hormann-Alper successfully creates two wildly different characters and keeps them distinct even when they share a scene. Pellett captures the indifference of a teen unaware he has sold himself into marriage for the chance to blow a car horn.

Lynn seems to physically melt into two opposing natures, and Farmer neatly reveals Luv's frustration - quietly underscored by Smith's direction in making him the only character who doesn't sit down.

This production will take you to another place and time.