Characters in 'Red Ryder' must face harsh truths about themselves

Playwright Mark Medoff doesn't hold out on the use of metaphor, a utility for which he bears no shame.

The character description page of his second play, When You Comin' Back Red Ryder?, which Opera House Theatre Company opens at Thalian Hall on Wednesday, is not a laundry list of gender sets and personality traits, but instead a telling, metaphorical line from each character's dialogue.

So what is Medoff waxing metaphorical about? Ideally, the answer to that query lies in the hands of the director for any given production.

Robin Dale Robertson, director of Opera House's shot at Red Ryder, has an idea: "I'm wondering if Medoff has a serious distaste for pretense."

Considering Medoff's play at fishbowl theater, in which each character seems to force the varying notions of the '60s, Robertson's theory is a valid one. (Red Ryder debuted off-Broadway in 1973 and was made into a film in 1979, starring, among others, Carolina Beach resident Pat Hingle.)

The play is reminiscent of William Inge's Bus Stop, the classic that finds eight people trapped by the frigid snow inside a truck stop diner.

Red Ryder is also set inside a truck stop diner and finds eight people trapped by one very frigid truth-teller.

Restaurant cook Stephen (Kevin Wilson), who would be too-cool if he were living in the '50s, sports a James Dean slickback, rolled-up sleeves and a "Born Dead" tattoo. Angel (Katie Parker) is a plus-size hash-slinger with a heavy heart. Clark (Randall Luca) is The Man to his overworked and underpaid employees, and Lyle (Maxwell Paige) is the stroke victim who runs the neighboring gas station.

As in most stories about small-town America, the hero of When You Comin' Back Red Ryder? wants to get out of town with mercury speed.

The answer to the titular question for Stephen "Red" Ryder is, unarguably, "never."

The play then introduces two very different pairs. Teddy (Alex Wharff) and Cheryl (Tamica Katzmann) are the "disaffected youth of the United States of America." Richard (John Perkinson) and his wife, the "added appendage" Clarisse (Roxann Hubbard), are an unhappy married couple.

When Teddy, a drug-smuggling Vietnam vet, goes on a riled-up rampage, he becomes a metaphor for the ugly truth and speaks the words nary a truck stop denizen wants to hear.

Teddy's trigger mouth puts a bullet into the salted wounds of Stephen's inability to be a hero to himself, Angel's impossible sentiments for Stephen, Lyle's mental and physical limp and the failing partnership of Richard and Clarisse.

"You come in here and you treat us as though we were somehow truly without worth," Clarisse says to Teddy at one point.

It's a moment that should have the audience considering their own self-dishonesty, a reactive realization that Red Ryder has the potential to induce.