I found this play during my stint as dramaturg at the Cleveland Play House and gave it a staged reading. I was convinced that the play had a lot of potential and I knew that Ron Wilson had a genuine voice that ought to be heard. I remember at the time trying to keep my own voice out of the process, but I wanted very much for Ron to balance the part of Gil with Johnny. I probably had the role of Gil in the back of my mind. The first incarnation of the play was so heavily weighted in Johnny's favor that there wasn't enought conflict to justify an entire evening in the theater. Ron was great about taking input and after the staged reading in the Brooks, made still more rewrites. So when Roy Berko called me and said he had a grant for the summer and asked me what I would do with it if I had it, I knew what I needed to do. And this play was central to the whole plan. This was the first play at the Ohio New Play Festival at Lorain County Commuity College. We got a lot of feedback from the audiences who didn't want to see Johnny killed off. The evening had so much light-hearted about it, it seemed difficult for many audience people to accept his violent demise. Encouraged by good reviews and strong audiences in Lorain, I knew I had to open the Cleveland Actors Theatre Company with it and Ron set about rewriting the ending. We had a hit..

Audiences responded very favorably to this play. And we got a surprising number of "non-traditional" theatergoers in the seats, especially during the run at the Hanna. The title alone conjured up a lot of interest. It is a great title. We were featured on a magazine catering to Corvette oficianados. The Plain Dealer gave us a lot of play, and we were off to a very good start.

REVIEWS:

The Ohio New Play Festival Production

THE PLAIN DEALER

Delightful trip that uses all the gears by Marianne Evett

OK, folks, time to drive to Lorain County Community College and see the kind of theater that shold have been nestling in Cleveland five or ten years ago, a small, tightly made new script given a crackling professional performance in a setting that allows you to be close enough to feel the heat.

"The Last Days of Route 66," the first production of the Ohio New Play Festival, is not a great play, but it is a strong one. Playwright Ron Wilson tunes into the fantasy and reality of growing up male in America with wit and insight, steering his theatrical situation dangerously close to cliche but mostly veering away at the last minute into truth.

On one level it's a good buddy play about mena nd cars. Gil Tanner (Wayne Turney) has become a successful car dealer in the 20 years since he graduated from high school; but in his Chevrolet showroom he still keeps the 1962 candy-red Corvette he and his former best friend Johnny Weber (Brain Bartels) used to tool around in before Gil got tied to wife, kids and mortgage.Then Johnny, scruffy and long-haired, drops by late one afternoon for the first confrontation they've had in many years. Johnny wants to recapture the past by ;going on the road, to drive the Corvette down Route 66 as they once planned to do, before the monotonous interstate takes over.

The two men seem almost too stereotyped--the successful dealer in his shiny red-and-purple showroom anxious to get ahead; the wild Johnny, downing boilermakers and raving about the poetry of freedom. Yet as characters, they define the war between freedom and responsibility that continues inside each one of us, so that the shattering explosion of the end seems enevitable. Growing up may mean killing off part of ourselves.

What makes the play work, however, are the two actors and the reality of the onstage relationship they create. Tom Fulton has directed with great sensitivity and drawn the best performance from Turney I've seen in a long time. It's funny and beautifully shaded, running from complacency to anger to fear and back.

Bartels is very good, but he doesn't quite have the depth for the perfect Johnny--a combination of craziness and charm that is both attractive and dangerous. He doesn't seem quite at ease yet, quite free to dive recklessly into the role.

This production only plays through XXX, so you'll have to hurry to catch it. But it pormises good things for the summer in Lorain.

THE FREE TIMES

Actors in Exile by Keith A. Joseph

At the Cleveland Play House a brand new shiny regime is about to try its hand at some heavy duty theatrical resuscitation. Their agenda entails the importation of hoards of New York actors and technicians. They are going by that well known equation: In with the new, out with the old.

As for the old, like our immigrant ancestors proved, there is nothing like some catstrophe and upheaval to shake the apathy off. For former children of the PLay House have gone forth and flourished. East siders and west siders will be sharing in the benefits of the newly released Play House Company.

Wayne Turney, who for a decade energized the Play House stages with his Scrooge and dozens of other larger than life roles, has taken harsh necessity like a dose of tonic. Taking advantage of a special new equity union contract that allows a fledgling company to get by with less overhead, Turney has herded some considerable talent out to the surprisingly beautiful theatre facilities at Lorain Community College. There, at the invitation of humanities head, Roy Berko, Turney is using his new production companyu to form the sorely needed "Ohio New Play Festival."

Their first production is The Last Days of Route 66. Holding to the festival's policy of using Ohio themes and authors, it is written by former Case WEstern Reserve playwright-in-residence, Ron Wilson. It makes for an auspicious festival launching.

The sign in Gil Tanner's office at Tanner Chevrolet in Kansas proudly proclaims itself as "The Heartbeat of America." With its slightly tacky red and purple furnishings and its assortment of trophies and potted plants, it is indeed a shining emblem for many middle-class white Americans who embrace the ideal of a house in the suburbs and a membership in the Kiwanis.

Thirty-nine-year old Gil Tanner (Wayne Turney) is seemingly a success. He is on the city planning commission and happily married to a devoted wife who plans all of his social engagements. His most cherished trophy is a 1962 candy red Corvette, safely ensconced in his car dealership's showroom. It is a memento of distant teenage days cruising the streets with his high school buddy, Johnny Webber, looking for "that cheerleader from heaven."

Though Gil fondly reflects on those lost days, he is clearly not prepared to confront the grim remnant, his old friend, Johnny (Brian Bartels), who appears sleazily drunk and bloated with failure. All Gil has to offer him is some complacent genialities and Dale Carnegie truisms.

Wilson's play is a high powered, gut wrenching exploration into male bonding with some psychological insights on two prevalent American prototypes. Tanner is part of an army of busy pragmatists in three-button suits who blindly subscribe to the rules of success. Any shakeup of the system traumatizes their tunnel vision of life. Life has bgeen a series of failures for Johnny. His marriage has ended in ruins and his recently deceased father obliterated his self worth. "I was just a piece of bad luck strapped to his back."

Emotionally stunted Johnny has pinned his salvation on the hollow cliches and songs of his childhood. His dream inspired from the old TV show Route 66 pushes him, in desperation to reclaim his old Corvette and best friend, Gil, in order to cruise down Rte. 66 to be whole again. The car is a twentieth century version of Huckleberry Finn's raft that whisks unhappy boys away from the responsibilities of adulthood. The tragedy for Johnny is that the car no longer belongs to him and that Gil, his former best buddy, is in reality, disgusted by his neediness.

The playwright has a sound ear and his pungent dialogue rings with lean, muscular intuitiveness. The play, good as it is, at various times comes to a grinding halt when some plot contrivances cause annoying potholes in the script. The predictable, violent ending is telegraphed from the very beginning.

Brian Bartels, with his large, pudgy form and stringy hair, is the perfect choice for the boozed up, burned out Johnny. He is a massive grizzly bear in pain, begging his former best friend to remove the thorn from his paw.

Typecasting, a consistent factor at the Play House, has repeatedly shoved Turney into fey roles. Here he taps surprising new levels in a challenging interior performance. There are moments when we see the pain of his role almost render into a toothless, old man.

Thomas Q. Fulton's direction is taut and powerfully focused. It makes for prime ensemble theatre.

The Cleveland Actors Theatre Company Production

THE PLAIN DEALER

Funny, tense curves along road to male bonding, mid-life crises by Marianne Evett

Well, it's nice to see Morgan Lund's wolfish grin onstage again.

Lund and Wayne S. Turney have launched "The Last Days of Route 66" at the Hanna Theater, the first production of the Cleveland Actors' Theatre Company, a new professional troupe built on former Cleveland Play House actors and designers. The play, which opened the Ohio New Play Festival at Lorain County Community College last summer, has its Cleveland connections too, since playwright Ron Wilson was on staff at Case Western Reserve University and the Play House and was a member of the Actors Company.

In the little studio theater at LCCC, with everybody on top of the actors, the play crackled with electricity. Now in a fully professional production (with a wonderfully appropriate set by Eugene Hare), it remains a good, solid show, with a lot of funny moments and some tense ones. But spread out on the Hanna's proscenium, the play also seems thinner, its weaknesses more exposed.

"Route 66" is a good ol' buddy play, about male bonding and male mid-life crises. At 40, Gil Tanner (Turney) has a big Chevrolet dealership and the wife, kids, club memberships and headaches that go with it. Out in the showroom, a candy-red 1964 Corvette remains as his only monument to rowdy high-school freedom. Then Johnny Weber (Lund), his best buddy in high school, drops by to get him and the Corvette and head for the last open stretch of Route 66, the "Mother Road," before it's closed down forever. Now jobless and alone, Johnny seems ready to resort to anything to make his dream come true.

It's Lund's show, especially the first act, when he circles this quintessential dealer's office (pine paneling and a big stuffed marlin) like a shark on the prowl, downing boilermakers made right in the beer can. His Johnny oozes the possible danger. But he is less convincing in the second act, when Wever's passion and weakness come pouring out in a series of confessions that show him veering between his love for Gil and jealousy because Gil got both his girl and his car.

Beside him, Turney as Gil seems at first almost too whitebread and subdued. I rememver his performance last summer in the tole as having more depth, although it might have been the intimate space. Certainly his Gil rises to real dignity at the end.

Wilson's gifts as a playwright lie in language and cahracter. The dialogue is consistently funny and true; its memories of high school and the 60's touch the right spots. But the play really doesn't have much of anywhere to go after the first act. The tension between the two men has been set up, the possible endings we can foresee tease us into staying with it. But getting to the resolution takes a while. Act II goes very much from one bit to the next with definite lulls in between. Some of the problem is Tom Fulton's direction, which seems indulgent, allowing the actors to do pretty much as they please. It could stand better pacing and judicious trims.

The end has been rewritten since last summer and now seems much more credible, although it is preceded by a series of fake endings, as if Wilson really couldn't find the right way out of the dilemma he'd set. Moreover, the end suddenly makes it a play about Gil, who grows up. But the focus in this production--because of the way it's written and because of Lund's performance--has been Johnny.

Nevertheless, this is a promising debut for a new company. It's especially encouraging to see them taking a risk in presenting this new play. It's exactly the kind of small professional theater Cleveland has needed.

THE SUN PAPERS

Company crusing along '66' by Teddi Gibson-Bianchi

"California Dreamin'" by the Mamas and the Papas played on the radio, while guys cruised drive-ins for cheerleaders and ate hamburgers greasy enough for a lube job.

These 1960's memories are evoked in The Last Days of Route 66, a new play being presented by the fledgling and very welcome Cleveland Actors Theater Company in its debut at the Hanna Theater.

Despite the newness of play and company, the experience is a bit like a homecoming.

The production brings together former Cleveland Play House actors Wayne Turney and Morgan Lund--plus other Play House veterans behind the scenes--in a comedy drama that focuses on reunion and remeniscence.

The Last Days of Route 66 is set in a Kansas auto showroom, "the Taj Mahal of car dealerships."

Owner Gil (Turney) is coping with a slow service department and a manufacturer's recall when he gets a surprise visit from his one-time high school buddy, Johnny.

Soon the two are guzzling boilermakers and reliving their youth: high school football games, girl friends, drunken fights, and how they identified with Tod and Buzz on Route 66.

For the upwardly mobile Gil, that's simply a forgotten adolescent fantasy. For factory-worker Johnny, it's a dream that must be fulfilled, a trip he mujst make before the last strip of road is demolished and his hopes with it.

He urges Gil to join him on the journey, even trying the persuasion of a pistol.

The Last Days of Route 66 is filled with nostalgia, as well as references to such topics as the American male's erotic connection to his automobile and the scariness at turning 40.

The play also traverses a lot of familiar territory with a certain slickness, but playwright Ron Wilson has an admirable ear for dialogue and a true gift for comedy. This comic edge is emphasized in the very athletic production, directed by Thomas Q. Fulton.

Turney and Lund give strong performaces, although Lund has a much flashier role which he exploits to the fullest. In a highly energized and focused performance, Lund shows the romantic and lunatic sides of good-old-boy Johnny--a dreamer in jeans.