‘The Last Truck Stop’ @ Kitchen Dog Theater
—Martha Heimberg
Kitchen Dog Theater’s intimate arena space is so dense with stage smoke when you go in, you think last week’s smothering wildfire haze has reached Dallas. But not just yet. The smoke magically disappears before the first scene. (It’s live theater, but it is theater.)
We’re about to see the world premiere of Texas playwright Crystal Jackson’s The Last Truck Stop, an 80-minute sci-fi-play set 20 years in the future. It addresses climate catastrophe, the threat of AI on truckers and humans generally, the closure of the West Coast, the forced removal of everybody out West into an Eastern city (ye gods!), and other miserable outcomes related to “late-stage capitalism,” as a retired postman explains.
Lotta bad news for even the toughest trucker to unload in one act.
Jackson gives the job to four characters at the Oasis Truck Stop in Truth or Consequences, New Mexico. Gladys (the excellent Diane Box Worman, who can arouse pity for a broken egg) is the retired trucker who owns the shop. Uncle Hank (an affable, philosophic Jamal Sterling) is her longtime, sometimes lover and hunky postal service man. He comes in, hangs up his gas mask, and urges her to join him by taking advantage of the Freedom of Removal Act.
Hank’s ready to go East, even if it means moving into “corporate housing.” That’s Gladys’s term for anywhere but her truck stop, currently serving only automated 18-wheelers. In her nostalgic elegy on cars, trucks and “the open road,” she calls herself a “roads scholar” and says travel is in her blood, recalling Jessica Bruder’s popular book and the film Nomadland, about people living fulltime in campers. The end of the world must be near if we can’t even see the past behind us, disappearing in a rearview mirror.
Despite her distrust of cities with “parks nobody uses” and warehouses where people work like robots (oh, no!), she’s pushing her beloved niece Zelda (a sweetly stubborn Kat Lozano, sporting shiny lipstick and a cropped haircut), to apply for a job in El Paso taking tourists around a replica of the Winston Crater, a huge hole in the ground in Arizona—the entire state now closed down, just like California. The playful pokes at the absurdities of tourism evoke quick, welcome laughter in a work with speeches about the loss of community and the fear-driven city folk who have no control over day-to-day life. The playwright, born in Houston and living in Austin (both rapidly overdeveloped cities with few zoning restrictions), knows what it is to wake up and find a drive-thru Taco Bell in your backyard.
Gladys loves her niece Zelda, who she’s raised like a daughter, but insists young folks yearn (and need) to see the world. Zelda is not so sure. Lozano’s Zelda is at her naïve-but-smart best in the scenes with Worman’s Gladys, where the bitter, experienced woman talks nostalgically about the past and the scary future, while the younger one tries to understand her cynicism. It’s not exactly the father/son talks in Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, but the two women do convey the same love for each other. Gladys recalls helping migrants, and Hank tells a fable about a genie in a beer can that was lost on me, but he tells Gladys the tale means “Life is short, and love is long.” They dance to “It Had to Be You,” and Zelda likes that Uncle Hank is around. Should they all stay, or should they go?
Then a cheerful female voice is heard through the static on Gladys’s ham radio set. After a bit of comic confusion, our fourth and final character appears. Rainbow Girl (Claire Carson, an ebullient and girlish embodiment of wanderlust and gay pride) has heard rumors there might still be an ocean on the other side of California, and a beach, and maybe some people trying to clean up the mess. Whoa. So how does this optimistic searcher after truth affect our trio? You’ll just have to peer through the opening smoke and see what you find out.
Director Christopher Carlos, KDT’s co-artistic director, keeps the talky, somewhat derivative play engaging with thoughtful movement and sharp pacing of dialogue sequences. The actors deliver a true ensemble performance. Clare Floyd DeVries’s detailed, realistic set design grounds the action, and Susan Yanofsky’s costumes say the future is (scarily) not that far away. Max Hartman’s sound design reflects the past and present of the characters, with lots of country and all kind of other bits, including R&B and swing.
WHEN: June 8-25, 2023
WHERE: Trinity River Arts Center, 2600 N. Stemmons, Dallas TX
WEB: kitchendogtheater.org for tickets, plus info on upcoming productions
