Considered a flop on Broadway in 1982, "Come Back to the 5 & Dime Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean" did not prove to be one of Robert Altman’s more popular films either when the director thriftily transferred his original stage production, all-star cast intact, to film (blown up 16mm). Nevertheless, this overwrought Texas gothic melodrama or comedy (which is it?) by the apparently reclusive or just elusive playwright Ed Graczyk (just see if you can come up with any biographical data on the fellow, or even a head shot) seems to possess its guilty pleasures for some. Indeed, Ruff Yeager has directed a snappy little production at the dinky 6^th @ Penn Theatre which despite (or perhaps because of) the absurdities of the play’s plot may succeed in happily inducting you, as it did me, into the arcane mysteries of the McCarthy, Texas, James Dean Fan Club, circa 1955-75.

The four former girls and one former (in a truer sense) boy of the old club have a reunion at the town Woolworth lunch counter where Juanita (Jill Drexler) still serves up, two decades after the movie star of the title shot his last film, "Giant," nearby and went back to Hollywood to perish in a car wreck. Amongst the several lurid revelations of the script (which are all thumpingly telegraphed well in advance of their inevitable confessions), the central dramatic scandal is that prior to his departure James Dean is reputed to have impregnated teenage fan club member Young Mona (Victoria Tecca) with a son who bears his name and is believed to be a moron. (This son is in fact that errant Jimmy Dean, often mentioned but never glimpsed, who is repeatedly bade to "come back" like Little Sheba.) Such at least is the tale which the mature Mona (Robin Christ) twenty years on professes to, and the rest tacitly acquiesce in. The truth proves less strange, but no less obvious.

Director Yeager has wrought much entertainment and charm from this soap-operatic material by engaging an ensemble containing several lively actresses who generate a lot of fun with their Lone Star style quips and quarrels. Jill Drexler’s pious and perpetually pooped Juanita combines her spot-on comic timing with sympathetic genuineness of character. Robin Christ handles Mona’s emotional peaks and crises with delicate believability, and Victoria Tecca imparts touching innocence to the younger incarnation of the same character and her fraught experiences.

Leigh Scarritt as Sissy and Wendy Waddell as Stella May bring some high hilarity and a touch of the grotesque to the parlous rows of their flamboyant characters. And Susan Stratton maintains as Joanne a magisterial air of mystery even beyond her own foreseeable revelations. The cast is capably rounded out by Danielle Rhoads as Edna Louise, Zoe Katz as Young Sissy, and Michael Cullen as Joe.

Yeager, with the able collaboration of light designer Mitchell Simkovski, integrates the repeated twenty-year flashbacks with clarity and even some poignant loveliness. Nick Fouch’s well detailed set design (with additions by the director and Dale Morris) sensibly concentrates upon the lunch counter area, finessing the dime store aspects. And Jyothi Doughman’s costume designs amusingly enhance some wilder aspects of the characters.

For all its cheap thrills and shocks, Graczyk’s script deserves some credit for holding the stage surprisingly well after a quarter of a century. Its sympathetic if sensationalized treatment of such topics as transsexuality and gay-bashing were perhaps a tiny bit in advance of its period and have lent the play a certain continuing spark of timeliness.

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