Diner drama: 'Red Ryder' is gritty, but its villain falls short

The words are spoken rather late in the play, when Alex Wharff's Vietnam vet Teddy pronounces himself "the disaffected youth of the United States of America."

In that phrase, one starts to see how When You Comin' Back Red Ryder?, currently riding in Thalian Hall's studio theater under the reins of Opera House Theatre Company, straps on its relevance boots.

Though the play is set the late '60s and was written by Mark Medoff in the early '70s, the notion of disaffected youth rings almost proudly in 2008. Just pick your flavor of social and political frustration.

The grit of When You Comin Back Red Ryder? is a somewhat unexpected but welcome turn for Opera House.

Red Ryder marks a malcontented rural America as it occurs in a New Mexico truck stop diner. Stephen "Red" Ryder (Kevin Wilson) is a kitchen sweeper with squinty-eyed dreams of wayfaring out of the desert. Angel (Katie Parker) is the dayshift waitress shafted by qualms with mom and unrequited love for Stephen. Richard (John Perkinson) and Clarisse (Roxann Hubbard) are just traveling through town and through their hostile marriage.

It doesn't take a village to shine a reflective light on these characters, but rather, it takes a villain. Teddy is the drug-smuggling - and maybe drug-addled - dark light in seething armor.

While the performances of both Parker and Hubbard are unequivocally brave, with respect to the sexually explicit turns their parts entail, neither is more than a three-quarter performance. The same goes for the performances of Wharff and Tamica Katzman, as Teddy's right-hand girl, both hitting good notes, but unfortunately, the same ones throughout.

Maxwell Paige is decidedly more delicious than the steak-and-eggs special as the worn and faded gas station invalid Lyle. Paige is effortlessly honest and, even with his mouth taped shut, his eyes are evocative. Perkinson also offers a praiseworthy portrayal, adapting the precision of modern acting to a 30-year-old play.

What is missing from most of the play's performances is the color and shading that's necessary to wrangle the magnitude of Red Ryder, a point where director Robin Dale Robertson abandons his actors.

If 2007 was The Year of the Villain, Robertson was negligent to ignore the inspiring portraits of silver screen stars Anton Chigurh (No Country for Old Men), Daniel Plainview (There Will Be Blood) and Briony Tallis (Atonement), instead allowing Wharff to be the obvious bad boy, spinning his chair around, hopping on the countertop, donning a laughing tic and bounding with energy but little true fright factor.

Too often in community theater, a director's priorities become confused. Whereas stage choreography is the least important matter, here it takes precedence over guiding an actor's arc.

Ironically, the fierce truth-telling nature of the dramatic Red Ryder is what was needed to make such a revelation.