‘COME Back to the Five and Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean’ is the Sunday 22 choice for 4 American Plays at Loft Venue. Bottom Dog Theatre Company is pioneering a quartet of plays by American writers for May Sundays in ‘read’ productions as opposed to fully costumed, acted and choreographed works.
Lack of producers’ money is at the nub of this but as Myles Breen of Bottom Dog points out, “Once again, actors, directors and other theatre workers are subsidising the arts. Let’s hope the funding bodies follow their lead”.
Jimmy Dean’s director is Noelle Browne, who has worked at Dublin’s Abbey and Gate Theatres. Ed Graczyk (US) wrote the complex, arty work that is ‘Come Back to the Five and Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean’, brought to prominence by director Robert Altman who staged it first (mixed reception) and then brought it to life on film.
A group of American women meet nostalgically in their hometown diner, close to the location set of Giant, the movie made there 20 years previously by James Dean and Elizabeth Taylor. Through some flashbacks, there’s a scroll back to the year of the Giant when Dean was in town, and his subsequent sudden death that set a nation in mourning.
Some audiences consider ‘Come Back to the Five and Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean’ to be treatise on patriarchy, the limiting roles for men and women in society tipping them to morbidity – reference Dean himself, and the character Joe/ Joanna. Others see it as an arthouse musing on small lives played out against the billboard of Hollywood. American dream, did it cloud when James Dean was thrown from his sports car?
Make your own sense of the intelligent reading that Noelle Browne will doubtless achieve with her actors. Loft Venue over Locke Bar, 8pm next Sunday 22; no fee but a donation is welcome.
