As he did last season with Salvage Yard, Bunbury Theater's producing-artistic director Juergen K. Tossmann has dreamed up a diverting group of blue-collar characters for Garage Sale, his second play. It's not a sequel, though the people inhabit a similar universe and exhibit the same sort of quirky behavior and spiky relationships that defined his earlier creations.
Tossmann obviously loves this milieu and the way his characters interact and view life. In his first play, Tossmann played Johnny, the salvage yard owner around whom all the action revolved. In this new Saroyanesque work, the plot hinges on an elderly couple, Evan (Bob Zielinski) and Molly Kelly (Mary Ann Johnson), speaking with lilting Irish accents, whose daughter and son-in-law are pushing them to move to a retirement home even though feisty Evan, age 78, proclaims, "I don't want to go live with old people." Wife Molly, more resigned to inevitability, says, "We can endure anything that comes our way." As they gather in the garage where their possessions are laid out for sale, Evan and Molly chat, bicker, and commiserate with their offbeat old hippie neighbors Harley (Tossmann) and his jealous, alcoholic wife Moonbeam (Diane Stretz Thurmond), their disaffected daughter Butterfly (Betsy Riesz), who wants to be an actress and change her hated name to Gwyneth, two homeless veterans -- gentle, shellshocked Ned (Robin Hunter) and Streak (Richard Terril Walker), and Kelly's daughter Katherine (Julie Zielinski) and her by-the-book husband Richard (Sam Mannino).
This excellent cast expertly conveys both the humor and the pathos in Tossmann's dialogue. The comedy is sweet-tempered except in two jarring instances -- a fistfight between Evan and his reluctant son-in law, egged on by others, and exchanges that use, in a supposedly benign way, what is usually considered a racial epithet. These stretch one's credulity, as do the things poor son-in-law Richard, a tightly-wound guy who works in human resources, is assigned to do and say as he gets drunk and takes heavy falls on his way to being transformed unconvincingly into another good ol' boy. Tossmann's inventive and involving first act loses steam in its second half, which could benefit from cutting and tight editing.
Overall, however, the sage of Bunbury has penned another satisfying entertainment that comes from territory he has made his own. Moreover, it includes a made-to-order part for himself that he plays to the hilt. And next season, on a playwriting roll, he will present Salvage Yard - Revisited, a sequel to his first work, which started it all.
