Photo by Siren Current and Kathryn Baylor Photography Alex Baylor, left, and J. Rob Taylor, right, perform their opening characters as radio personalities of Station OKKK during a dress rehearsal of “Greater Tuna.”
HOPE — Take a trip and tune into the tiny town of Tuna, Texas as WILLow LeaVes of Hope presents dinner theatre performances of “Greater Tuna” by the Passion for Acting Theatre Company. Originally opening last weekend, the show will continue at 6 p.m. Friday and Saturday in Hope.
The play gives audience members a comedic look at some of Tuna, Texas’ unique residents. There’s Petey Fisk who works at the Humane Society, used weapons store owner Didi Snavely, radio station OKKK’s weatherman Harold Dean Lattimer who predicts a swarm of locusts and many, many more characters.
“I look at it as kind of ‘All in the Family,’ kind of ‘Archie Bunker’ish humor,” Director and Passion for Acting Theatre Company co-founder Connie Kiviniemi-Baylor said. “You get to see a few, I would say, ‘bigoted’ folks, and it kind of makes me cringe, some of the things they say. But it kind of pokes fun at that too.”
Just as unique as the characters, this play also stands out for having every character played by one of two actors, with J. Rob Taylor and Alex Baylor performing 10 characters each. Kiviniemi-Baylor said they play everything from a young boy younger than 10-years-old to an 80-year-old woman, and Taylor said he even plays a dog.
“My favorite is Aunt Pearl Burras, so she is a chicken farmer who unfortunately has an addiction to poisoning puppies that trespass on her property,” Taylor said. “She’s a hoot, she’s crazy.”
Baylor, who has been acting since he was a child, said “Greater Tuna” is definitely a different show and that he has never been in a show where he plays multiple characters, let alone as many as this. While he said it is hard to pick his favorite character, he narrowed it down to Fisk, the troubled teen Stanley Bumiller and Vera Carp, the vice president of the Smut-Snatchers of the New Order.
“(The characters are) really all wildly different, the only commonality between them is they all reside in Tuna, Texas in the greater Tuna area,” Baylor said. “It’s just a bunch of wacky characters and it’s really just this satirical take on that rural, small town, country kind of community and I think it’s really funny. The fellows that wrote it many years back did a good job with it, it’s a hoot.”
Baylor and Taylor are also supported by stagehands backstage including assistant Malia Taylor who helps out with costume changes. The two leads have shared the spotlight before in previous shows. He said it is nothing but a pleasure to act alongside Taylor, a mutual sentiment Taylor shares with his co-star. Taylor said they are both a little goofy, so they will try extra things to get that right moment.
“I mean, you love somebody that can really lean into the scene and you’re playing the scene instead of worrying too much about what your fellow actor is doing because you trust them implicitly to be able to bring the best performance forward, and that’s what I feel with Alex,” Taylor said. “It’s just great acting alongside him, he’s phenomenal.”
Kiviniemi-Baylor said audience members can look forward to seeing the actors quickly switch from character to character and seeing them changing personalities, voices and appearances. She hopes they make the audience laugh with some of the humor, but she also hopes it shows how far people have come, she said.
“I guess just that plays, live theatre can portray life and perhaps poke fun at some things, point out some things that should not be and so for me, having read the script and having seen them act it out, it reminds me how far we’ve come as just a more accepting, welcoming people… more empathetic I guess and seeing other people’s points of view,” Kiviniemi-Baylor said. “And so, that’s what this play brought up for me was, ‘oh yeah, I remember some of those, being around people who had some of those thoughts when I was… a young child,’ and how glad I’m not around that kind of sentiment anymore.”
