TexasTripIe Play

American regional theater has acquired everything that Ford Foundation money could buy. Marvelously designed new playhouses in charming settings. The best of British directors. The most reputable of Broadway actors. Everything, that is, except an honest-to-God native playwright.

Now, at last, the repertory theater network has its white hope: Preston Jones, 40, author within three years of three new plays as indigenous as hominy grits. Lu Ann Hampton Laverty Oberlander, The Last Meeting of the Knights of the White Magnolia and The Oldest Living Graduate--known collectively as A Texas Trilogy--were brought to public attention on a typically Texan scale. Two New Year's Eves ago, Dallas Theater Center patrons experienced a triple-play production of all-night Jones that began at 7 p.m. and lasted through 2 a.m. Since then, Jones' trilogy setting, the mythical West Texas town of Bradleyville (pop. 6,000), has been put on the map all over the regional theater circuit. This spring Trilogy made the big time at the Kennedy Center, where it entranced Washington audiences for 16 weeks. Indeed, this Southern export traveled so well that Producer Robert Whitehead this week is bringing Trilogy to that island where regional theater always goes when it succeeds: Manhattan.

Not the least part of this drama within American drama involves Jones himself. In his Levi's jacket and open-necked shirt, standing 6 ft. 3 in. even without his stetson, Jones seems to have sprung from a Marlboro ad. In fact this quintessential Texan--moving slowly, talking slowly, even smiling slowly --was born in Albuquerque. From 13 on, he worked as a janitor, a cattle weigher, a powderman in a Colorado mine, a highway surveyor, a truck driver, a uranium prospector.

Repertory Gamut. For the past 16 years, however, he has managed to confine his energies to the Dallas Theater Center, where he has served as stagehand, ticket taker, director and actor, running the repertory gamut from Julius Caesar--he played Brutus--to A Streetcar Named Desire.

Jones likes to claim that he turned to writing only when the Theater Center recruited more and more workers, leaving less and less for him to do. A Texas Trilogy was composed mostly after theater hours.

Now, after a lifetime's apprenticeship in obscurity, Jones has suddenly found himself beset by fame. "This has been a weird year," he says, and the coming year will be even weirder as he develops, willy-nilly, into the latest candidate for great American playwright.

Is he being overrated to meet a demand? Is he just one more case of '70s audiences confusing their own nostalgia with an artist's talent? Or "has Texas spawned a new O'Neill?", as a cover of the Saturday Review breathlessly asked.

In this undisciplined enthusiasm, Jones has also been mentioned in the same breath with Tennessee Williams and William Inge, whose early plays found first production more than 20 years ago at the Dallas Theater Center. Jones himself suggests other comparisons. While playing the stage manager in Our Town, he confesses he sensed an ambition to become West Texas' Thornton Wilder.

The Inge of, say, Picnic may be the level at which Jones hits at present. Like Inge, he has a paradoxically lyrical feeling for ordinariness--for hopes and disappointments on the banal scale of "a small frame house in a small framed town."

In Trilogy, the moral polarities of Bradleyville are defined in all their loneliness by Southern Baptists and Red Groove's bar. Lust exercises itself on Saturday nights in dusty pickup trucks at drive-ins, and pays for itself in house trailers. The cycle of life is dramatized by Lu Ann: cheerleader at 17, beautician at 27, "howdy wagon" hostess at 37. For the Bradleyville young who go away and come back, the big news 20 years later is, "The Dairy Queen put in a new parking lot." As for social vision, Bradleyville sees little beyond the astigmatic pathos of the Knights of the White Magnolia, a secret order that makes the Ku Klux Klan seem leftwing.

Future Lack. "I don't write about now," Jones confesses. "I write about yesterday." The characters in A Texas Trilogy look back as compulsively as the author--to their youth, to World War II, or even World War I. They seem doomed to speak and think in the past tense. The dimension they lack is the future.

Here is the flat art of realism matched to the flatness of small-town American life, a genre as old as Winesburg, Ohio and Main Street. What then makes Jones' lives under glass more than mementos in a Texas museum? For one thing, sheer theatricality. Jones is a master of timing. He knows just when to end a scene, and exactly how much sentimentality to balance against exactly how much humor. Above all, he has an ear for dialogue. The flavor of A Texas Trilogy is finally the flavor of its speech --the drawling, lip-smacking pleasure of one drinker saying of another, "Hell, Skip wouldn't pass up a drink if he had to squeeze it out of an armadillo's ass."

Whether Jones, now revising his fourth play, A Place on the Magdalena Flats, has the depth to extend an attitude of compassion into a vision of tragedy remains to be seen. For now, he can write a superior version of the sort of modern folklore that makes Bobbie Gentry ballads. He has perfected a form of theater that plays like country-and-western without the music. This is no small achievement. In the present state of the American theater, it may even be enough.

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