Amid all the comedies, musicals and children's shows, sometimes a community theater will slip in a piece of serious drama much the way mothers will hide pills in a spoonful of sugar.
The idea is to make audiences and performers stretch, to add some ballast to a theater season often filled with colored balloons. The plays tend to be those that true theater-lovers love.The problem is only true theater-lovers attend them. And in a tiny community, that can mean an audience the size of a small dinner party.
At least that was the case last week at Heritage Theatre in Perry, where director William E. Hall Jr. and his dutiful cast have mounted "Painting Churches," a taut family drama. People stayed away in droves. The play, though not as grim as Strindberg, has enough edge that the Salt Lake Acting Company mounted it last season.
If you go to "Painting Churches," you have to be willing to question some biases and take a punch or two.
The story revolves around a fading Pulitzer Prize-winning poet, his aristocratic wife and the visit of their talented but vaguely disappointing daughter who has returned to paint a portrait of her parents.
It is, indeed, a troubled little trio.
Gardner Church, the poet, has lost so much of his mental spark that he now lapses into cliches ("You don't look so bad yourself." "Why don't you sit down and take a load off your feet?" "How about a drink to wet your whistle?") When not repeating himself, he tends to spout old poems and talk about his upcoming blockbuster project.
As for his wife, Fanny, she chirps and tweets like the caged bird in the background and spends her time trying on thrift-store hats and packing things for a move to a smaller home. Daughter Mags has come back, we quickly see, not so much to paint a portrait of these two as to lay some ghosts and resolve her childhood conflicts.
As Gardner, Joseph A. Batzel - a gifted character actor - gives the father a "doddering old poet" spin, complete with the affectations and mannerisms that often stick to the elderly. Known for his dramatic readings, Batzel adds the high point with a recitation of Yeats.
Betty Thomas plays Fanny in a bumptious, flitty style - a cut above the standard community theater versions of mothers who seem to be LDS matrons about to serve cookies.
Krista Cae Mortenson and Randi Harrington Weekes are dual-cast as Mags, with Mortenson giving the character a high-strung, insecure tone that indicates an East Coast society princess trying not to whine.
Director Hall blocks well and does a good job of posing the threesome in interesting positions - not unlike Japanese flower arrangements.
Lighting, sound, sets, props and costumes are competent and handled with care.
In the end, the reason "Painting Churches" has had "legs" around the country is because of the universal stresses and strains at its core. These people may be Boston snobs, but their fears and longings are not much different from the fears and longings of all families. Even in the outlying areas.
And that, it seems, is something many community theater patrons haven't quite tipped to.