Review: Thank You and Have A Nice Day by Summer Break Theatre
by David Glen Robinson

Summer Break Theatre is largely a company of theatre teachers available to produce only one play a year as a group, during summer break. They are not alone in that: most theatre pros in Central Texas support themselves with career jobs outside theatre. Those full-time  jobs  are vocational activities, side hustles that provide almost all their income in our increasingly expensive Austin. Acknowledging  that, Summer Break Theatre puts it all into one production per year. They're all in for teachers. This summer they did Thank You, and Have a Nice Day, a play by Monroe Oxley, teacher, Southwestern University staff member, and MFA student in playwriting at the University of Texas at UT El Paso.

 

The progress and language of Oxley's script shape what this reviewer and others sometimes call a "trailer court play." I've seen a lot of those. Thank You, and Have a Nice Day is one of the better ones on the back lot. It doesn't in fact take place in a  trailer. The set is a clean living room of a lower middle-class domicile. Beer bottles are set around, and snacks sit on the coffee table. A large-screen TV is positioned upstage right; it comes on unbidden to issue dire warnings or offer the palliative of pro wrestling.

 

 

The characters themselves presented by this excellent acting  ensemble  are what convey the “trailer court” vibe. Most lack even a shred of education, the exception being Molly, portrayed by Maggie Meador, “the brains behind Pa,” to borrow a phrase from Dylan. The only backstory given for the principals is that of Molly’s work in theatre at a community college and in community theatre. As fort her husband James (Shane Cullum) and her brother Chad (Jon Demitchell, also the director), we know only that they are happy to stay home from work with paid time off. Yay, more time for beer and pro wrestling! Their blank background is one uneven aspect of the script, all the more troubling because the playwright deliberately does not flesh out other characters in order to keep them mysterious.

 

The Jenkins couple are the real piece of work. David Lampe as Thomas Jenkins and Anna Becker as Patty Jenkins convey artificiality from their first entrance. There's something not quite right about them. In their first five minutes onstage they evoke memories of the SNL comedy sketch The Coneheads. Dan Ackroyd and Jane Curtin were the famous alien neighbors who consumed mass quantities of tinfoil and beer. Here, also, we're struck by the couple's high strangeness. Surely, Cthulhu reigns in the back room of the bakery where the Jenkinses prepare their kolaches. Kudos to Lampe and Mercer and director Demitchell for this comic turn.

 

Demitchell also plays Chad, Molly's brother and quintessential ne’er-do-well brother-in-law to James. Demitchell leads from the front, active in all his scenes, showing as much as telling, and using all the stage space. His Chad has the naïve openness of the happy ignorant. He embraces every conspiracy theory that comes along and offers beer to all.

 

 

 

Chad’s friendliness contrasts with the deep darkness around James. James lounges in his high-backed, not-easy chair for most of the play, advising everyone, at times quite forcefully, to heed the TV warnings to stay inside, and implicitly to leave him alone. He verbalizes hostility to the Jenkinses, who seem, oddly, not to take much offense. Shane Cullum as James knows his task on stage is to serve as foil to all the others, and this he does well. With a little more script help from Playwright Oxley, the James character could have been memorable.

 

Oxley’s play revels in absurdity, but it is not a work of absurdism. The plot depicts a series of worsening environmental events that build without letup toward some apocalyptic climax but the surprises come in the events of everyday life. Families and married couples reveal themselves under pressure, rather than in the events of weird snow, killer lightning, giant snowballs from Jupiter, and conspiracy theories becoming real. The characters imagine their fate differently, if at all.

 

The story alludes indirectly more than once to the suicide cult in San Diego twenty-five years ago that expected to leave earth by riding on the Hale-Bopp comet. But things only get serious in Thank You, and Have a Nice Day after the major lightning attack when Chad takes a mighty throat-hit off the whiskey bottle. That's how we know it's a tragedy—but from there it only gets funnier. Funny how that is. Playwright Oxley builds up a lot of complications in the play, but then rides off on his own comet in a satisfyingly ambiguous ending.

 

 

Thank You, and Have a Nice Day is not for children by reason of some exceptionally coarse language. Everyone else should enjoy it immensely. If they had the free time, Summer Break Theatre could put up solid productions two or three times per year,as do other theatre companies in the region. We'd be highly appreciative if they did. 

 

 

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Thank You and Have A Nice Day
by Monroe Oxley
Summer Break Theatre

June 7-10 & 15-17, Hyde Park Theatre, Austin