For 27 years, Joe Sears and Jaston Williams have been playing all the wacky folk of tiny Tuna, Texas - men and women, young and old. Yet it's their female characters - such as Sears' cantankerous, dog-poisoning Aunt Pearl and Williams' gravel-voiced, used-weapons entrepreneur Didi Snavely - who grab the most stage time, get the biggest laughs and have become the series' trademark figures.
"We didn't plan it that way," Sears says. "But from the first show (Greater Tuna, premiered in Austin in 1981), they've taken charge. Maybe it's that we both came from families with fairly dominating women. Maybe it's that every play needs some heart. While we can find it in a few of the men, like Petey Fisk (the town's meek but determined animal advocate), it usually arises more naturally from the women."
"I think it's a Texas thing," Williams says. "For instance, you can talk about all the colorful men there've been in Texas politics - but then you throw in Ann Richards and everyone else pales beside her. We've got a line about how Texas men may be scary but it's really the women who run the show."
Or maybe it's just that — as Milton Berle and Flip Wilson proved to TV audiences years ago — a guy in a dress is funny.
That dictum seems especially true for Sears and Williams. Offstage, in their street clothes, these down-to-earth guys probably wouldn't be pegged as actors. They look more like ranchers or truck drivers. However humorous, their male characters usually hew to that offstage reality, a look that's — well, kind of ordinary. By comparison, the Tuna women are outrageous, outlandish and outspoken, letting the actors paint the roles in bigger, brighter colors.
Williams says it's a blast when he and his co-star take on such bold, outspoken personas as sassy Tastee Kreme waitresses Helen Bedd and Inita Goodwin. "These two are not making enough money to be polite," he says.
"I'd have to admit they (the female characters) are more fun to play," Sears says. "It's the stretch they give us, the chance to exaggerate."
Tuna Does Vegas, the fourth and newest in the series, returns to Galveston's Grand 1894 Opera House tonight and plays through Aug. 24. The pair (who co-write the shows with director Ed Sears) report it has undergone considerable change since its premiere there one year ago.
Sears and Williams are continuing a long-standing theatrical tradition. In the early 20th century, Julian Eltinge's tasteful impersonations were seen as a tribute to womanhood. Stars from Ray Bolger in Where's Charley? to Harvey Fierstein in Torch Song Trilogy to George Hearn in La Cage Aux Folles won Tonys playing heroes/heroines who (either by choice or necessity) spent much of their stage time in women's garb. More recently, Fierstein won again playing a woman (not a man dressed as one) in Hairspray.
The device has long been a favorite in movie comedies, with such standout entries as Tootsie, Mrs. Doubtfire and the classic Some Like It Hot, the ne plus ultra of drag cinema.
Obviously, the Tuna guys appreciate the comic opportunities in such gender-bending.
"My role model is Flip Wilson as Geraldine," Williams says. "That character was so politically incorrect and absolutely brilliant."
With two actors playing some 20 roles between them, two key challenges of costuming the Tuna shows are keeping each character distinct and making the changes possible in just seconds.
Linda Fisher, the New York-based designer who has costumed the series from the start, says she uses a color code to help the audience keep the characters straight. Perpetually hassled homemaker Bertha Bumiller favors lime green (an "acid green" Fisher calls it.) Would-be social lioness and "smut snatcher" Vera Carp wears peach.
The identifying factor can also be a pattern rather than a color: Aunt Pearl in old-fashioned print dresses, OKKK radio host Arles Struvie in plaid shirts, and so forth.
"When I first did the show," Fisher says, "they'd done some work on their own, coming up with clothes that worked for the characters. The original lime green polyester pants suit for Bertha was something that Jaston had found in a thrift store — and he actually fought a woman to get it."
As to facilitating the quick changes, Fisher says "there's no one solution." The techniques vary, but she most often creates systems of layering, so that pieces of costume can be quickly removed to reveal the next change. Transitional passages often find one or both actors just offstage, morphing from one character to the next, while continuing to deliver overlapping dialogue.
Fisher agrees the series' women are the more flamboyant roles, but feels the team keep the menfolk in proper balance.
"What makes it work is that Joe and Jaston play them all sincerely, including the women. They're acting women characters, not men in drag, camping.
Because it's the first of the series to take the Tuna characters beyond their home turf, Vegas is the team's most elaborately costumed outing. There are new, non-Tuna characters, including dueling Elvis Presley impersonators and hotel manager Anna Conda (who, Williams reports, "favors snakeskin muumuus.) Even some Tuna folk get beyond their Texas-tacky fashion roots. Aunt Pearl wins some loot and gets dolled up. Helen and Inita get jobs as showgirls.
Wait till you see those costumes.
Courtesy of The Houston Chronicle
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