"Greater Tuna" Spoofs Small-Town America

By L. Pierce Carson

The Napa Valley Register

A simple party skit nearly three decades ago blossomed into a critically acclaimed comedy that’s been staged in theaters all over the world — even a command performance at the White House.“Greater Tuna” is a delightfully devilish satire on life in rural America created by Oklahoma natives Joe Sears, Jaston Williams and Ed Howard, who also served as its original director.

Two actors play more than two dozen characters — including men, women, children and animals — who inhabit Tuna, “the third smallest town in Texas,” where the Lions Club is far too liberal and Patsy Cline hits are heard nonstop on radio station OKKK. The two-act, two-hour comedy begins with a radio report on the death of Judge Roscoe Buckner from an apparent stroke while wearing a 1950 turquoise Dale Evans one-piece swimsuit with “lots of cowgirl fringe,” and draws audiences in as it provides a fascinating look at outrageous small-town inhabitants, along with non-stop laughs.
The show began in the early ’80s as a party skit the trio created based on a political cartoon. Early tour dates found an instant audience coast to coast, as the show played to packed houses in San Francisco, Atlanta, Houston and Hartford before Sears and Williams found themselves performing “Greater Tuna” for more than a year Off-Broadway at Circle in the Square Theatre.That led to an HBO special produced by Norman Lear, which took the “Greater Tuna” phenomenon to every city in America.

Sears and Williams eventually took the show to the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, D.C., and a pair of command performances at the White House for President and Mrs. George H. W. Bush in 1990 and ’91.The popularity crossed the Atlantic Ocean in 1988 as the highlight of Scotland’s famed Edinburgh Festival, while San Francisco’s Marines Memorial Theatre saw a record-breaking seven-year run.Audiences liked “Greater Tuna” so much that Sears and Williams have written three sequels, which are all playing somewhere in the country at present.

“Greater Tuna” finally showed up in wine country last weekend, in the capable hands of a pair of talented southerners, Jef Holbrook (Georgia) and Topher Payne (Mississippi). Sunday afternoon’s performance at Yountville’s Lincoln Theater was the final stop on a seven-month-long coast-to-coast tour. Seeing someone other than Sears and Williams inhabit the characters they created was indeed enlightening — to see that they’d drawn such larger-than-life caricatures that others could build on.

Although I’d seen the savvy Oklahomans send audiences into fits of laughter on numerous occasions, there were moments when I actually thought the weekend visitors were able to breathe added life into their respective roles. This is not an easy show to do as both men are often required to walk off stage and reappear in a matter of seconds as someone new, wearing a completely different set of clothes.

The two-member cast launches its small-town tale with radio announcers Thurston Wheelis (Holbrook) and Arlis Streuve (Payne), roles to which they return throughout the show.But they also introduce us to the Bumiller family — Holbrook as the well-intentioned mother, Bertha, and Payne playing the roles of the three children — twins Stanley (a reform school alum) and Charlene (a cheerleader reject) and Jody, who willingly takes home all the stray dogs offered to him by the director of the humane society.

Holbrook also does a star turn as Aunt Pearl Burriss, who runs a one-woman campaign against chicken-killing dogs with her “bitter pills” (read poison) until she accidentally kills her husband’s prize bird dog.The list of characters includes a klansman, staunch weatherman, UFO spotter, and the vice president of the Smut Snatchers of the New Order, a fashionista named Vera Carp. I feel Payne made this character even more bizarre than the actor who created the role.

A moderately sized crowd, offered a cool auditorium on a hot afternoon, seemed to really enjoy this marvelous satire of small town Americana. Holbrook and Payne did the show’s authors proud.

Men in Dresses

Small-town humor provokes big laughter with two-man tour de farce 'Greater Tuna'

by Lily Dayton

Monterey County Herald

Y'all are invited to the small town in the big state where people owe more money on their tractors than on their cars and where the four seasons are known as almost summer, summer, still summer and hunting season.
The comedy show "Greater Tuna" will be featured at the Golden State Theatre in downtown Monterey tonight (Thursday) at 7:30 p.m.
This production, presented by Artbeat, features the two actors and quick-change artists Jef Holbrook and Topher Payne portraying 22 different characters through a series of rapid-fire costume changes. All of these changes will take place in less than 10 seconds.
Ed Howard, one of the three original writers of this comedy as well as the director of its Broadway production, is directing the show that will appear tonight in Monterey.
Howard and his friends Jaston Williams and Joe Sears wrote this comedy in 1981. It quickly became a cult favorite in Austin, then moved on to the Alley Theatre in Houston, the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C., and an extended run at Circle in the Square on Broadway in New York.
Described as "deliriously funny" by Alan Ulrich from the San Francisco Examiner, the story takes place in the (fictional) third-smallest town in West Texas.
It's a typical day in town until the local judge is found dead in a woman's one-piece swimsuit. This starts a chain of events that interrupts all of the characters' lives, creating havoc, mishaps and loads of laughter.
When asked what makes this show so tremendously funny, actor Holbrook's immediate response was "Men in dresses."
Fellow actor Payne followed this up with, "What makes this show funny is that small towns are small towns wherever you go. Every town has its own local busybody, the woman older than Egypt who everyone's terrified of and the local delinquent often discussed at the dinner table. The humor comes from the identification. And then of course there are the men in dresses."
These two actors have a playful camaraderie between them, so it comes as a surprise that they didn't know each other before they started their first "Tuna" tour last February.
"We met at the first rehearsal," said Holbrook. "We had two weeks to put the show on and we just took off like old friends. Now it's hard to imagine doing this show with anyone else."
Holbrook commented that the rehearsal process was a challenge for the two of them with roughly a dozen characters a piece — two hours of material for only two actors; but he said that the quick character changes have become second nature to them both during the show.
To help with the quick-change process psychologically, they each have their own tricks.
"Jeff has his whole dressing room routine, but my biggest trick is looking at what shoes I'm wearing," said Payne.
Holbrook described his dressing room routine. "I sit in the dressing room and listen to music that makes me happy. Tom Petty or the Wallflowers or basically any good, twangy acoustic music that makes me think of Texas. The music relaxes me — it's Pavlovian. If you go on stage all tense, you're dead."
"Almost all the costume changes happen off-stage," said Payne. "We have two amazing dressers back stage that work twice as hard as we do. It's an absolutely full change — for example, going from a reverend in a full suit with a wig and a moustache, then walking on stage as a sheriff with a gun, holster, sunglasses and hat."
Though Holbrook considers himself an actor before a comedian, he's very comfortable in a comedic role because he's previously acted in many comedy shows (including the film "Morris the Cat").
"I think stand-up would be fun, but I've never done it," he said. "I love acting — and comedies are fun."
Payne considers himself a writer who acts. "I primarily work as a playwright and I just finished my first book — a memoir of my mid-20s, "Necessary Luxuries." During this time, I was diagnosed with cancer and went through treatment three times. Then, after the last treatment, I took off with just a suitcase and traveled to Scotland. The book takes off when I return to America with nothing but my suitcase."
He credits the life-changing experience of cancer diagnosis and the subsequent roller coaster of treatment as giving him a new lease on life. "This gave me a new appreciation for taking risks and seizing opportunities that are out there, being aware of what you can live without. This tour is an extension of that experience. (Before cancer treatment) I never would have set everything aside and jumped into a 16-passenger van."
Payne said that the humor in "Greater Tuna" is appropriate for adults and older children.
"Not that there is any material that would be inappropriate for young kids, but the comedy is geared toward 12 and up. Still, we have had 8 or 10-year-olds in the audience that were cracking up."

"Tuna" Just As Funny As a Jerk In the Knee

by Scott Whited

The Pueblo Chieftain

Is it more enlightened to laugh at people, or to laugh with people? The audience at "Greater Tuna," the season finale for the Center Stage Performing Arts Series on Saturday night, didn't have to concern themselves too much with that question. They got to laugh both with people - their fellow seat-sitters at the Sangre de Cristo Arts and Conference Center, and at people - the hapless inhabitants of Greater Tuna, the setting of the play described in the program as the "third smallest town in Texas."

It's late summer 1981, and the folks of Tuna are small- and narrow-minded, perfect fodder for laugh-inducing jabs by playwrights Jaston Williams, Joe Sears, and Ed Howard (who also directed). A record-burning is in the offing, but listeners of omnipresent radio station OKKK are told not to worry: pompadoured Little Richard is going to hell, but hip-swiveling Elvis up in heaven because he's a good ol' country boy at heart.

This play is a favorite for both touring and ambitious local companies, mainly because of its primary theatrical device: Its 20-character cast is played by two virtuoso actors. This attracts actors because of the challenge and producers because of the reduced cost. Pueblo has, in fact, seen a number of versions over the last decade or two. People love to laugh (just ask Ed Wynn in "Mary Poppins") and "Greater Tuna" provides plenty of laughs.

The two-man cast in this production featured two Georgians, Columbus-bred Jef Holbrook and Atlanta-based Topher Payne. Both were talented clowns, milking their characters for all the broad comedy they could. Heck, with so many yokel Texas twangs on display, they were halfway home. We all know that hicks and rubes are funny by definition, right?

A fine example was Holbrook's R.R. Snavely, a besotted local who played an imaginary violin while trying to figure out whether he had or had not seen a UFO (short for "Unidentified Flying Object," OKKK repeatedly clarifies for its audience), shaped like a chalupa. Payne depicted many a goofy laugh-inducer, especially the holier-than-thou Vera Carp, whose sleep-excused show-stopper was splaying her beskirted legs indelicately in the crowd's collective face. Happily shocked chortles filled the auditorium.

There were occasional nods in the direction of empathy for the hicks. Holbrook's big-hair housewife Bertha Bumiller does her best with her oddball brood, but betraying husband Hank (also played by Holbrook) leaves her soothing her pain with the country Dr. Phil: Patsy Cline singing her ode to eternal love, "Always." Animal-lover Petey Fisk (Payne) beseeches a Lord he's not sure is out there, "If you did create all this, we could sure use some help taking care of it."

"Greater Tuna" takes sure aim at our funnybones. But the comedic response is similar to that of a knee's jerk in response to a tap by a physician. We know these situations, accents, and characters are supposed to be funny, so we laugh as a reflex, almost without thinking.

Upon reflection, however, there is a mean-spirited quality to the humor. These people are provincial, not terribly well-educated, and biased in favor of their own experiences and habits. They deserve to be laughed at, right?As Vera Carp says to a fellow viewer visiting the town's funeral home to pay respects to a male "hanging judge" who's been found dead of a seeming stroke while wearing a Dale Evans swimsuit, "Glass houses."

Glass houses, indeed.