Arts Listings

What the eye don’t see, the heart don’t grieve.” Foxfire, now onstage at Contra Costa Civic Theatre in El Cerrito, is about the grieving of a vernacular culture for what’s gone, whether it’s seen or not. 

Aunt Annie Nations (portrayed splendidly by Pat Parker) has lived on the farm at Stony Lonesome in the Appalachian country, Rabun County, Georgia, “since I got married.” It’s all she’s looked at in her no-nonsense manner for a long while. 

Her husband, Hector (another sterling performance by T. Louis Weltz, showing a man both diffident and occasionally ebullient), who inherited the farm from his father and worked it all his life, died five years before the curtain goes up, buried in the orchard offstage. But Annie still sees him, talks to him, listens to him and argues with his jealously framed scriptural quotations, all designed by this matter-of-fact phantom to keep her there, on the land, tending to him in death as well as life. 

The neighbors have been selling out, moving on—or into trailers with TVs. Nearby Ruby Ridge is all development. Prince Carpenter (wryly played by Joe Fitzgerald) shows up, a realtor, trying to buy the farm from Annie, who instead gets him to pop out the eyes in a sow’s head for cooking and gather apples in the orchard. 

Prince mistakes Dillard (Malcolm Rodgers in a dead-on portrayal of a simple man grown complicated), Annie’s musician son visiting with a sack of oranges, for a rival developer from Florida. Dillard, touring for his career, wants Annie to move in with him, away from the mountains, and help care for her grandchildren, but resents the intrusion of the hick realtor, turning farmland into tract homes. 

“What is troubling you, Dillard?” “Nothin’. Just livin’” Rodgers’ Dillard shows the glib smile from town and honkytonk that is covered over the deadpan of the hills. Yet there is a mournful twinge to his grin, the same catch heard in his songs. 

When his mother finally consents to see a show of his, her first, the pretty schoolmarm who accompanies her, Holly Burrell (Jennifer Antonacci), later tells Dillard she doesn’t like him so much as an entertainer, a professional hillbilly, dressed up “like an ice cream soda” and talking about his old neighbors so they sound like they are “out of L’il Abner.” She preferred his amateur style, “just your voice and guitar.” “It wouldn’t pay the rent,” Dillard dryly replies. 

On Eugene DeChristopher’s set, rough-hewn wood structures above fog-shrouded valleys and distant ridges, where a picnic table serves in memory as the site both of a birth and of laying out the dead, a great deal unfolds in scenes from the past and present.  

There are some particularly fine moments: Wendy Welch as the young Annie, ecstatically stepdancing, when Matt Davis’ young Hector comes to awkwardly ask her hand, after pocketing a red cob of corn at the shucking so he could kiss the prettiest girl; Holly as a student, recording the Nations family’s stories, being put on and charmed by Hector as Dillard listens, amused, later singing “Sweet-Talkin’ Man”; fine repartees between the living and the dead over duty and steadfastness, and equally fine soliloquies delivered straight to the audience, which amount to Hector’s show-within-a-show, revealing both his hard life and not-so-stern humor at times. 

And throughout, from before the lights go down to the curtain call, there’s lots of good, well-played, well-sung country music, written by Jonathan Holtzman for the original show, directed for CCCT by Alan Spector, and performed by Rodgers, Chuck Ervin on bass, Polly Frizzell and Tony Phillips on fiddle and George Martin on banjo, with a few airs sung rough by other members of the cast. 

Foxfire’s a good entertainment that never quite becomes either a play or cabaret, not that its value as entertainment is compromised. The different modes of presentation, all enjoyable in themselves, sprawl rather than coalesce. The character of Holly seems important at first, then fades away. And the part of ghostly Hector, obviously a vehicle for coauthor (with Susan Cooper) Hume Cronyn for a star turn, ends out of proportion with how it began. 

But director Mark LaRiviere gets a lot of juice from his cast of nine (including Roger Craig and Zak Filler), making the contradictions of a homecoming yet leavetaking play that both goes against and plays off the hillbilly stereotype seem natural enough, and regretfully over too soon. CCCT has a hit with this one, in which simple folk, who seem to have the consolation Hector enunciates: “Maybe we’re lucky—we got no choices,” find out they have a few simple, difficult choices to make, after all. 

FOXFIRE 

8 p.m. Fridays and Saturdays, 2 p.m. Sundays through May 11 at Contra Costa Civic Theatre 

951 Pomona Ave., El Cerrito. $11-$18.  

524-9132, www.ccct.org.