THE LAST, BEST SMALL TOWN


Two families living side by side in smalltown America, their teenage offspring head-over-heels in love, and an all-seeing, all-knowing stage manager serving as our narrator. Sound familiar?

Only the town in question isn’t Grover’s Corners, New Hampshire. It’s Fillmore, California, the families are the Millers and the Gonzalezes, and the year is 2005 in John Guerra’s World Premiere wonder The Last, Best Small Town, now captivating audiences at Will Geer’s Theatricum Botanicum.

Like Charles Webb before him, Hank Miller (Christopher Wallinger) edits the local paper and his wife Willow (Christine Breihan) is a stay-at-home mom to graduating high school senior Marcus, about to join the United States Marines, and Marcus’s year-younger sister Maya (Jordan Tyler Kessler).

Benny Gonzalez (Richard Azurdia), on the other hand, is no town doctor like Frank Gibbs, but works as a mechanic at a local car dealership while his wife Della (Katia Gomez) cleans rooms at the Fillmore Best Western (and on weekends at homes like the Millers’) and helps raise their college-bound son Elliot (Kelvin Morales), this afternoon’s graduation speaker.

In other words, while these two families aren’t exactly the Webbs and the Gibbses, they’re close enough equivalents for Southern California in the early 2000s, where Latino families outnumber their white counterparts, and where even among friends and neighbors, matters of class and race are never far from the surface.

Not only that, but with war raging in Afghanistan and the Great Recession only a few years away, it seems clear from the get-go that however rosy Graduation Day 2005 may be, dark clouds just might be looming on the horizon for those who call Ventura County’s Fillmore home.

Taking an American theater classic as his inspiration, playwright Guerra (who grew up 40 miles from Fillmore in Carpinteria) has created characters and plot twists very much of his own.

For Hank Miller, the house he and his family call home was only meant to be a starter, whereas for Benny Gonzalez, his home signifies an American dream come true.

And whereas Willow Miller spends her time taking Tae Bo classes while paying Della to keep her house spick and span, the Gonzalezes couldn’t afford theirs do if Della quit her job at Best Western.

As for Elliot and Maya, though their futures paths may seem similar on the surface, there’s a big difference between a son whose parents have scrimped and saved to give him a future they could not have imagined for themselves and a daughter who’s scarcely had a moment’s doubt she was on her way to UCLA or Brown.

Guerra’s characters may fit certain stereotypes, at least on the surface, but they are each and every one developed with subtlety and depth and brought to life by a pitch-perfect cast under Ellen Geer’s pitch-perfect direction.

Azurdia, Breihan, Gomez, and Walllinger’s pair of long-marrieds have the ring of truth, of twenty years spent together raising children they can be proud of. (Breihan is particularly fiery in the play’s most powerful confrontation.) Miguel Perez is terrific too as Benny’s hangover-prone dad, and Kessler and Morales reveal themselves a couple of rising stars whose future projects I can’t wait to see.

Last but not least, “Playwright” Leandro Cano narrates The Last, Best Small Town with a wry, folksy charm (and steps into a couple of cameo roles just as Our Town’s Stage Manager did before him).

 Design elements are everything a rising playwright could wish for. Emily Hucal’s props transform Theatricum Botanicum’s year-round set into side-by-side homes, each with its own look. Beth Eslick’s costumes are precisely what each character would wear, and Bri Pattillo’s lighting design and Grant Escandón’s sound design are first-rate as well.

Kayla Ibarra is assistant director. Kim Cameron is stage manager and Sydney Russell is assistant stage manager. Sierra Friday is production assistant. Tracy Wahl is costume assistant. Lucy Pollak is publicist.

World Premiere plays are a Theatricum Botanicum rarity, just one reason The Last, Best Small Town is a summer/fall must-see in a season that also includes Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Julius Caesar.

I loved every second of it.

The Will Geer Theatricum Botanicum, 1419 N. Topanga Canyon Blvd., Topanga.
www.theatricum.com

–Steven Stanley
August 15, 2021
Photos: Ian Flanders

 

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