Last Gas

I’m not sure what symbolic meaning the title, “Last Gas,”has for the plot and characters of this whimsical romantic comedy, but its literal meaning is the setting of a gas station and convenience store in a little township in northern Maine. Ditto the pun in the Paradis family’s name, so that the place is “Paradis’ Last Convenience Store,” and the sign can warn that it is the last gas and last convenience for 41 miles down the road.

Since the characters are laconic New Englanders, it’s a good thing that the setting permits the technical staff to tell what the actors don’t have to. Geva’s production gains considerable atmospheric interest in its stunningly detailed, elaborate, multi-leveled set by Robert Koharchik with three separate rooms and a stairway to the upstairs living area, a fully stocked and equipped store downstairs, and a sizeable outdoor area and driveway and icy, woodsy scenic view. Kendall Smith’s complex, mood-defining lighting and Dan Roach’s sound designs for the upstairs and store TV sets and for cars and trucks arriving and departing and choking when trying to start in the frigid weather – all add atmospheric and comic drama.

Nat Paradis, the central character, is a self-confessed unhappy man with little sense of belonging. His teen-aged son, Troy, is visiting briefly but lives with his divorced mother and uses her name, Pulcifer, hyphenated after Paradis. Nat runs the store and lives upstairs, but his father, Dwight Paradis, owns everything. Cherry-Tracy Pulcifer, Nat’s ex-wife, changed her name back and is a uniformed forest ranger who punishes Nat and anyone else that annoys her by writing tickets fining them for violations of her own imagining. An old schoolmate, widower Guy Gagnon, helps out at the store and hangs around being Nat’s drinking buddy. Guy is laconic and fat. And finally, Nat’s post-divorce girlfriend, Lurene, who grew up with all these folks, is visiting from New York for her mother’s funeral, and Nat hopes to reunite with her.

The solid cast adds more performance humanity than the script suggests. David Mason holds these plot threads together in an impressively authoritative performance as a loser who suffers a good deal of abuse as the central focus of all these lives. Nick Erkelens lends some charm and character to the underwritten role of the teenaged Troy. John Pribyl is memorably comic and cruel as the selfish old father Dwight. Aaron Munoz somehow manages a lot of character in an understated, deadpan performance of Guy, whose dialogue is mostly incoherent. And the two women are gems. Gabra Zackman is deadpan funny and inventively entertaining as the would-be martinet and controlling ex-wife and mother, Cherry – now Tracy. And Brenda Withers makes the hopelessly inept and helpless ex-girlfriend Lurene (now called Lou because others didn’t like the name Lurene) a sympathetic, funny woman who blossoms into a charmer when she’s dancing.

By the end I rather liked all the folks here, even those I don’t think I was supposed to.

*

Spoiler alert: In 2010, reviewing Almost, Maine, a whimsical romantic comedy by this same author, almost as appealingly directed at this same theater by this same Skip Greer, and starring this same David Mason, I described one of the skit-like scenes as follows. “Two county boys find that they’re more comfortable with each other than in other situations and finally blurt out that they love each other. But they regard this revelation with much more discomfort than that felt by the conventional straight audience for whom this play is clearly intended.” Perhaps from internal hints, or perhaps from that background, I was prepared for this play’s eventual explanatory conclusion that Nat’s and Dwight’s mutual antagonism, and Nat’s failure as a husband for Cherry and incompetence as a father for Troy and as a lover for Lurene – all just reflect Nat’s actual love for Guy. For Last Gas, that revelation leads to a conclusion that is perhaps deliberately both unresolved and unpromising for every character in the play.