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The New Yorker
By Edith Oliver |
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In "Greater Tuna," at Circle in the Square (Downtown), two actors - and they are actors, although at first I was inclined to consider them clever entertainers - play twenty citizens, male and female, of the third-smallest town in Texas. Their names are Joe Sears (portly) and Jaston Williams (slight), and if ever there was a pair of quick-change artists, it is Williams & Sears. The jokes are often broad, but after a while one realizes that they are quite sharp, too, there is real satire here, mixed with some fairly loose comedy, and a couple of stories run through the show. The action covers a single day in Greater Tuna, opening and closing with news broadcasts from the local radio station. In the course of the action, we visit the houses of two portly matrons (Mr. Sears), one of whom tries to feed breakfast to her three unruly children (Mr. Williams), while the other spends most of her time preparing strychnine pills for dogs, There is a scene at a funeral home, where two women view the remains of a judge with scarcely concealed hard feelings, and where the oldest of the unruly children comes in to share a private malicious joke; and there is a late afternoon meeting of the Smut Snatcher Society, conducted by a minister (Mr. Sears) and the woman who runs it (Mr. Williams). The whole enterprise is much more enjoyable than I've made it sound, the characterizations being considerably funnier than the lines. "Greater Tuna" was written by Mr. Sears and Mr. Williams, along with their director, Ed Howard.
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