THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1994, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Thursday, August 4, 1994 TAG: 9408020146
SECTION: NORFOLK COMPASS PAGE: 14 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Theater Review
SOURCE: Montague Gammon III
LENGTH: Medium: 59 lines
Candy Aston's fine performance doesn't make ``A Fruitwood Casket in an Asphalt Vault'' funny, warm and absolutely delightful all by itself, but it sure helps.
``A Fruitwood Casket'' is the high point of Generic Theater's New Plays for Dog Days festival of four new plays.
Allyson Currin's script, which follows a currently popular mode of comedies about Southern eccentrics, is infused with compassion and sympathy. Like the woman who Aston plays, it maintains a calm tolerance of all the unique, strange and downright weird personalities who populate it.
Currin still manages to wring from her unusual characters all the humor they can provide, without stooping to anything like low mockery. Her wry, gently pointed approach provokes an eerie range of good-natured response from chuckles to guffaws.
She also cooks up some pretty funny souls who never get on the stage. The funeral oration by the lisping, saliva spewing, fire and brimstone preacher would be a comic turn to die for, as the phrase goes.
Kik, Aston's character, has just been widowed after more than 50 years of marriage. She is left with an old farm that never suited her urban upbringing, two sisters-in-law who need her, some grown children who don't, and a head full of memories.
One in-law is a somewhat simple, slightly obsessive spinster whose life revolves around the superficialities of social interaction. The other is as crazy as a bedbug.
Betty Xander and Sheila Walters are more than good in these roles, but the script just doesn't give them the stage time nor the depth it gives Kik.
The same may be said of Terry M. Westerman, Leigh Winter Hronek and Shelley Shields. As son, daughter-in-law and daughter, they're all entertaining and just as believable as can be.
Aston gives one of those quiet, richly detailed and subtle performances that is so seamlessly constructed one sees no acting, but only a real, dimensioned character.
Her performance bridges the difficult gap between the broad humor and the tender sentiment that are the play's emotional poles.
The consistently high quality of the acting throughout this show is a great credit to director Jefferson H. Lindquist.
``A Fruitwood Casket'' has one more night of performance. Be advised that the Generic Theater's seating capacity is limited. ILLUSTRATION: AT A GLANCE
What: ``A Fruitwood Casket in an Asphalt Vault'' by Allyson
Currin
When: Aug. 12, at 8 p.m.
Where: Generic Theater, 912 West 21st St.
Tickets: 441-2160
by CNB