Allison Moore's Hazard County, opening this year's 29th annual Humana Festival of New American Plays at Actors Theater of Louisville, sounded so promising with its conflation of unusual source material - a real-life Kentucky murder and the redneck TV series "The Dukes of Hazzard," so popular (and still in reruns) from 1979 to 1985. For this reviewer, however, the promise was unfulfilled. While all that talk about the hell-raising backwoods boys Bo and Luke and their 1969 Dodge Charger R/T with its Confederate flag on the roof and "General Lee" painted on the door met with whoops of laughter from many in the audience, their joy was not transferable to people, myself included, who never saw the show and have no desire to do so.
Moore sets her play in "a very small town in southwestern Kentucky," which certainly pinpoints Guthrie, KY, birthplace of the late Pulitzer Prize-winning author Robert Penn Warren and site of the 1995 gunshot murder by a young black man of a young white man flying a Confederate flag on his pick-up truck. Hazard County shows how 30-year-old Ruth (Chelsey Rives), widowed eight-and-a-half years ago by an identical incident (husband flying Confederate flag on pick-up truck is shot and killed by black youth driving by), is barely coping while raising rambunctious twins (Jesse Hooker and Mary Bacon), working at a dead-end factory job, and staying at the ramshackle house of her down-home cousin, Camille (Elizabeth Meadows Rouse).
Husband Michael, her high-school boyfriend with his "Duke heart" may have used the "n-word" before he was shot, but he was just a fun-loving guy who thought the red flag (no thought of racism) looked good on his red car. Thus does "The Dukes of Hazzard" set the atmosphere for this laboriously contrived plot. To the Sons of Confederate Veterans and Michael's bitter parents, he was a martyr who, as they told his daughter, "died for the cause." And at a memorial for him, thousands of dollars were raised for a trust fund for his children. Ruth, to avoid guilt for taking money from white supremacist groups, has not touched it. Into the insular town comes Blake (Sean Dougherty), traveling with a Congressional research group called the National Committee to Study Rural Reinvestment. But it's eventually revealed (after local boys suspicious of outsiders set fire to his rental car) that he is also a reality TV producer for Fox News, looking for a way to become a legitimate journalist. Ruth's story, he realizes, is just the ticket. Before you can whistle Dixie, he's spending the night with her in a motel while he types and sends a proposal to Fox via his laptop. But smooth sailing for their relationship is not in the cards. (Earlier he had asked her if she had a boyfriend. Her astonished reply was "Have you seen my children?!) Yet, surprisingly, she volunteers, after sleeping with Blake, that she had had other men following her husband's death.)
Moore is out to prove that there's good in the worst of us (maybe excepting the Ku Klux Klan and Aryan Nation) and bad in the best of us. What she shows, too, is a lot of soap opera pretentiousness in her characters, Blake, in particular. "You are unlike any woman I've ever met," he tells Ruth. "I just want to whisk you away." And, analyzing himself, he says, "I want to be that little boy from Connecticut so full of hope."
Rives is a fine actress, but she certainly doesn't sound like she comes from that part of Kentucky; she's much too sophisticated for that milieu. Rouse is a warm, witty, and winning Camille. Dougherty works hard at his interloper role and almost brings it off. Hooker and Bacon are too old to play the twins, but Bacon manages to inhabit her role better than Hooker. They're uncredited in other parts - Hooker as an off-the-wall, pop-culture lecturer re "The Dukes of Hazzard" and Bacon as a Canadian with a website devoted to the TV series and its "harmless entertainment."
Paul Owen's junk heap of a set with its dirt floor is, among other things, the interior of Camille's house, a juke joint, a motel, and the outdoors where Ruth and Blake speed down a highway in a red car. It's a trailer-trash treasure trove with its refrigerator overgrown with ivy, a beat-up stove, a TV set, sleeping bags for the twins, and a suitcase on a metal table under which someone has tossed an empty paper cup.
