Last exit

A light mortality at the Players’ Ring

By Robert von Stein Redick

The Last Ticket Home runs through February 4 at the Players’ Ring. Call (603) 436-8123

LAST TICKET HOME: more than just a meander down memory lane.

Growing old, my grandmother tells me with deepest conviction, is no fun. She is never wrong, but in the case of the six old men ofThe Last Ticket Home, the heaviness of age — of not-too-distant death, in fact — meets its match in a restless appetite for living.

At the outset, they are only five: the residents of an isolated Vermont boarding house, whose front porch and yard set the stage for this original Players’ Ring comedy. Slouched on benches, dressed in thrift-shop attire, whittling sticks, and nipping from flasks, the most attractive thing about their lives seems to be that they can do with them as they damn well please. Since they’re all single and the television is broken, this means gabbing up a storm. The “Dear Abbey”-style column from the local paper is their chosen target for ridicule; it is also, with its romantic minidramas, a device for goading these old timers into facing the lovers, sins, and unanswered questions of their lives.

But Jack Black’s play soon reveals itself to be much more than a meander down memory lane. The basic and consistently pleasant surprise of Last Ticket is that even the frailest of these men can’t really sit still. What to do instead is an elusive question: ill-tempered Elwood (Dick Ingram) growls that his friends are “all talk”; retired boxer Kyle (Matthew Lamstein) looks at him in wonder and replies, “Of course we are.” Yet none of them can quite accept this retort, this limitation. Not when Kyle, a heavy drinker, pines for the woman who abandoned him for some “little guy who’s always fixin’ the furnace.” Not when Mort (Mike Pomp) thinks constantly about a drug-addict daughter who hasn’t spoken to him since her abusive childhood. Not when Sandy (Alan Huisman) mourns for the chance he didn’t take with a vagabond beauty desperate to whisk him off to Ireland.

And bigger surprises than these are in store. One of them involves the missing sixth man, Ernie, off on a trip to collect $10,000 for a winning lottery ticket. Ernie (Bernie Tato) is gone long enough to become a point of conversation himself, and when he does appear, he nearly shocks the old folks out of their skins. It’s not the spotless brown suit, or the cleric’s serenity of his words. It’s his calm assertion that he was run down on the highway, and has returned to start his afterlife among friends.

Wait a minute! What about the drinker and his daughter? What about the Irish romance? And the other intrigues, too numerous to name, in play before Ernie shows up and declares himself an angel? Impressively, Black keeps tabs on the whole busy barnyard of interlocking stories. At every turn, the plot and personalities evolve: we learn that surly Elwood had a father named “Daisy,” that frail Sandy had nearly finished art school when a friend proved that he was blind in a third of the color spectrum, that Phil (Dale J. Young) is the survivor of parents who dabbled in the occult. And while the play is cleverly ambiguous about whether Ernie is really back from the dead, it’s hard to picture anyone less than an angel tying up these loose ends.

In fact, Last Ticket takes on so much that at times it resembles a notebook for three or four plays, rather than the full realization of one. The effect is rather like canoeing with a guide so avid for side-streams that he neglects to show you the river.

It’s hardly the worst vice a play can suffer from, especially one this funny. Last Ticket is at its best when the old men’s banter is given free reign:

Phil: I was wondering—

Kyle: So was I . . .

Phil: Oh, what were you wondering?

Kyle: Nah, you first.

Phil: No, go ahead! Maybe we were wondering the same thing.

Kyle: Maybe . . . but I’m losin’ mine right now.

Good humor, like some of the most sublime philosophical moments in theater, is often no more than an aside. Hamlet and Polonius need never have discussed the shape of clouds; Macbeth might have skipped any mention of a candle. The trick is to convince us that every side-stream ultimately reaches the sea. This is where the Players’ Ring production might have accomplished more.

Casting is one difficulty. It’s never entirely possible to see these men as septuagenarians: most look a good decade shy of retirement. More important, with so much ground to cover, is the need to distinguish scenes sharply — by pacing, emotion, physicality, whatever is required. This doesn’t happen nearly often enough, and so the men’s wildly different stakes (one is considering dog breeding, another suicide) end up feeling roughly equivalent, the jokes like echoes of themselves.

Yet this isn’t a tedious play; on the contrary, it’s an unusually thoughtful look at mortality and resistance to mortality, shot through with grace and gentle humor. Black’s script brims over with invention; the production barely keeps pace. In this ninth season for the Players’ Ring, one of the region’s most reliable venues for original drama, it’s a shame to see such a slugger of a play not staged for all its worth.

Robert von Stein Redick can be reached at robvsredick@earthlink.net.