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Thursday, February 12, 1987 / University Daily Kansan
Be-boppers go back to Texas 5 and dime in '70s drama about teen idol James Dean
"Come Back to the 5 and Dime Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean" will be performed at the Ingle Theatre in Murphy Hall at 6:00 p.m. today. The tickets are $40 for students, Tickets are on sale at the Murphy Hall box office. Tickets are $2 for KU students, $4 for students and $3 for senior citizens and other students
Staff writer
By JERRI NIEBAUM
The past and the present merge in "Come Back to the 5 and Dime Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean," a play being performed at the University of Kansas this week.
Members of the fictious "Disciples of James Dean" fan club reunite 20 years after James Dean's death in this late 1970s drama by Ed Graczyk.
John Gronkue-Tedesco, associate professor of theater and media arts, is directing the play as part of the Inainge Imae Memorial Theatre Series.
He said each character in the the play was trying to heal an old wound to help make present life more bearable.
"You can't keep track of the past," he said.
The play is in set both 1955 and 1975 in a dried-up west Texas dime store. The dime store is a timeless meeting ground for the reunion.
The middle-aged women clank their Lone Star beers together and toast to "James Dean, long live the dead."
James Dean looks at the women from a screen above the set. Murals of west Texas encircle the audience, and slide projections of Dean and
west Texas change throughout the play.
"You're in west Texas where there are miles and miles and miles," said Delbert Unruh, associate professor of theater and media arts.
Unruh said he designed the set so that members of the audience would feel as if they were on the open plains of Texas. Even the soda fountain is realistic.
"I've spent a lot of time in places like this," he said.
Onstage, the scene jumps from 1975 to 1955. The women are fresh out of jail in their Sisters, MGairt in Sisters, dating, and "Giant," James Dean's last movie.
Mona, one of the middle-aged women, watches another actress come onstage to play Mona as a '50s be-homer.
"It's a whole new play," said Alice Kinsella, St. Louis, Mo., senior, who plays the young Mona. The two actresses studied each other so that their mannerisms would be the same.
Mona had played a bit part in "Giant," which was filmed nearby, and she imagines that she is having a love affair with James Dean.
Gronbeck-Tedesco said, "The impact he had on her is very complex. She carries it with her to middle age."
James Dean, a teen-age idol, died in an automobile accident Sept. 5, 1955, three days after the last day of filming for "Giant."
Mona has a baby nine months after appearing in "Giant" and pretends that her son, Jimmy Dean, is the son of James Dean.
"We won't let him die," young Mona says. "His son will carry on in his place."
Joe, Mona's childhood friend and the town's black sheep, is Jimmy Dean's real father. He loves Mona, but she asks him to leave town.
Joe shocks the women at the reunion by coming back 20 years later as "Joanne." He renamed himself after him and operation he underwent 13 years before.
"Joe is just your average Ameri-
an and you're Dorell, Topeka,
Missouri."
Joe is confused about his gender. His mother wanted a daughter.
"Joe always hangs out with girls," Dorrrell said.
Lynnae Lehfeldt, Olathe sophomore, plays Joanne, a role she said was challenging.
"She's strong-willed. She has to be," Lehfeldt said about her character. "I feel like a woman with a mission."
Gronbeck-Tedesco said, "They're a bunch of people with blindfolds on, looking for a grasshopper in a barn with a stick."
Joanne is the least disillusioned of the women, and she tries to bring her old friends out of their "la-la land," Lehfeldt said.
Sissy, played by Cynthia Evans-Hanna, Roeland Park junior, lives behind a false face and a bounf
wig. She joins Joanne in her quest for the truth about the past and her friends' relationships.
"We've lived our lies too long." Evans-Hanna said.
Mona finally admits that Jimmy Dean is not James Dean's son after he drives away from the 5 and Dime in Joanne's Porsche.
Jennifer Houston, Kansas City, Mo., junior, and costume designer for the play, said she tried to design the costumes for the young and the middle-aged characters to show how the characters had both changed and staved the same.
Colors and silhouettes draw parallels between the past and the pre-
He said that people attempted to control the past and present by labeling time.
"These characters feel trapped," he said.
Gronbeck-Tedesco said every audience member would find a new way to view the play.
"Come back to the 5 and Dime Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean" opened on Broadway in 1982, and a movie was made the same year. Both the Broadway production and the movie starred Cher, Sandy Dennis and Karen Black. Robert Altman directed both productions.
Gronbeck-Tedesco said the KU production was different from the Broadway and movie productions. In previous productions, all the actors played both their past and present roles, but in the KU production, some
During dress rehearsal for "Come Back to the Five and Dime Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean," Alice Kinsella, St. Louis senior, and Tony Dorrell, Topeka senior, prepare for opening night. The play runs from today to Sunday at the William Ingle Theatre in Murphy Hall.
actors play both parts while others do not.
Gronbeck-Tedescha said some actors found it difficult to "act to silent text" as the scene changed time periods.
Kinsella said she was the only Mona on her stage.
"It it's like our own little world," she said.
Gronckee-Tedesco directed "Agnes of God" at the Crafton-Preyer Theatre in Murphy Hall last year and has directed several other plays at the Crafton-Preyer and William Inge theatre.
Museum's exhibit commemorates Anne Frank's ordeal
Bv IFNNIFER FORKER
Staff writer
Anne Frank died in a concentration camp in 1945, but her memory lives on in a diary published two years after her death.
In her diary, Anne tells of two years of hiding with seven people in a tiny attic in a Nazi-occupied Amsterdam.
An exhibit of photos documenting Anne's ordeal will open Sunday at the Museum of Anatomy and will run for two weeks.
University of Kansas Hillel, a Jewish student organization, is
sponsoring the exhibit, said Daveen Litwin, director of Hillel.
In addition to the photographs, the exhibit includes Jewish ritual objects and a section that explains the history of anti-Semitism, said Celia Daniels, public education coordinator at the Museum of Anthropology.
Litwin said the exhibit was designed to inform people about the horrors of religious persecution and other human rights issues.
"This should never happen again," Litwin said. "Unfortunately, it is happening now. We have a
In spite of the horrible things people do to each other, there is still hope.'
Daveen Litwin director of Hillel
to prevent it in the future.
"The message is that in spite of the horrible things people do to each other, there is still hope," she said.
She said she thought that visitors to the exhibit would attain their own messages from the exhibit.
responsibility to ourselves to learn about the past and the present and
The exhibit has traveled across the country since the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam created it in 1985.
The Anne Frank House, which helps to preserve Anne Frank memorabilia, created the exhibit to commemorate the 40th anniversary of Europe's freedom from
Nazi occupation.
The exhibit also commemorates the 40th anniversary of Anne Frank's death, at age 15, in Bergen-Belsen, a German concentration camp.
The exhibit arrived somewhat damaged last week and Litwin said that museum employees were working to remove finger prints and dirt from some of the photos.
Daniels said she would explain the exhibit to about 500 junior high students from Lawrence, Topeka and Kansas City, Kan., at the museum. She will show the
students a film about Frank's life, then lead a discussion about bigotry, racism and discrimination.
"We're encouraging them to do some critical thinking about the meaning of Anne Frank and to ensure that nothing like that will happen again," Daniels said.
Litwin said the Lawrence Community Theatre would perform "The Diary of Anne Frank" in April to complement the exhibit and the April 26 anniversary of the Holocaust.
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