Good ol' boys and the women who love them (or at least marry them and then tolerate them) populate the rural Texas town in which James McLure sets his sad/funny twin plays -- one for the women and one for the men. Laundry and Bourbon, the opener, takes place on the porch of Elizabeth's (Amber Davies) house. Her old high school classmate, now the mother of three rowdy kids, drops in to gossip and share a few bourbons and coke. Elizabeth, looking forlorn and distracted as Hattie (Amy Zuccaro) chats away, reveals that husband Roy, a restless Vietnam vet enamored of the 1959 pink Thunderbird convertible he has had since high school, has been gone for two days -- not too surprising since he disappeared for five days last year.
As the girls let their hair down, Hattie confesses she trapped Vernon, Jr., into marrying her because hell raiser boyfriend Wayne - now serving prison time as a car thief -- jilted her. And Elizabeth discloses she's pregnant. The girls see a car coming up the road and think it might be Roy, but it's Amy Lee (Dana A. Hooper), who sets their teeth on edge and has been an annoyance with her put-on airs ever since their school days.
Amy Lee, now the wife of nerdy Cletis, who manages his father's appliance store, has married ("for money") and belongs to the country club. She has come to deliver a filter for Elizabeth's broken-down air conditioner but probably just wanted to snoop and prate about her Baptist morality and superior lifestyle. That doesn't keep her from knocking back a few drinks and telling which married people in town are running around with whom, making the dusty burg a regular Peyton Place.
Lone Star, the men-only flip side, is a drunken late night gabfest outside a honkytonk called Angel's Bar, mainly between Roy (Brian Curley) and younger brother Ray (Gerry Renders), who didn't serve in Vietnam. As the night wears on, their bummed-out exchanges, interrupted briefly by doltish Cletis (Woody Zorn), take a sudden turn toward calamity and shock involving Roy's precious Thunderbird and Elizabeth's pregnancy. Dan Welch, directing the women, and Edward Spalding, directing the men, draw strong performances from their casts. Especially effective are Amber Davies as patient, understanding Elizabeth and Gerry Renders as meek, mumbling Ray, wily and deferential in his redneck way.
