Theater review: The Last Meeting of the Knights of the White Magnolia

by Arnold Wayne Jones of Dallas Voice

If you know the locale (West Texas) and the era (1962), it would be hard to hear the title of the play The Last Meeting of the Knights of the White Magnolia and not think: Racist bubbas. There’s something about the word “white” in the context of the South during the civil rights era that just seethes with bigotry masquerading as Southern pride. I’ve seen it up close, and the Confederate flag might as well have a swastika on it if you’re black and living in Mississippi. And I’m talking about today.

So it might seem like sitting through a play about these racist folk — and a comedy, no less! — is some kind of betrayal of good liberal values. It’s not. Dallas playwrighting legend Preston Jones, who wrote the scripts for his Texas Trilogy during lulls while working the box office at the Kalita Humphreys Theater, was chronicling the fin de siecle of the Old South mentality. Some of the characters are portrayed in a sympathetic light, of course, but White Magnolia doesn’t glorify or sentimentalize its subject. This is the “last meeting,” after all. Good riddance, and don’t let the door hit you on the ass on your way out.

There is, however, a melancholy tone to the play, getting a more-than-serviceable production at Contemporary Theatre of Dallas (CTD produced the first two plays in the trilogy, Luann Hampton Laverty Oberlander and The Oldest Living Graduate, over the last two seasons, often with the same cast members). Set in a rundown meeting hall of a faded hotel in fictional Bradleyville, Texas, it concerns the remaining motley members of a once-potent white supremacist group — one that broke off from the Klan, presumably, for being too tolerant.

Despite its roots, the group has largely morphed into a social club for henpecked husbands and stir-crazy milquetoasts, a place where they can drink bourbon and play dominoes once a week. Assuring the success of the Master Race is one thing, but getting drunk before coming home to the wife ... well, a man has to have his priorities.

Certainly that’s why raging alcoholic Skip (Kevin Moore) comes. He drinks the booze provided by Red (Kevin Grammer), while Rufe (Bradley Campbell) and Olin (J. Rod Pannek) bicker away like a married couple. Senile old Col. Kincaid (John S. Davies) seems to be the only one who holds the old values dear — and they include hatred for folks from one town over, regardless of race.

(Ironically, the most appallingly racist aspect of the play is the portrayal of the one black character, the janitor Ramsey-Eyes. Why actor Kenne Sparks and director Rene Moreno decided on such a shuffling, Stepin Fetchit stereotype slaps you in the face from the first scene and rears its head awkwardly for the next 90 minutes. Yikes.)

The banal joys of male bonding are interrupted one evening with the addition of a new member, Lonnie Roy (Trey Birkhead, the nephew of Preston Jones, performing for the first time in one of his uncle’s plays). His initiation rite triggers the slow destruction of the club as the realization of its impending uselessness gets magnified. (For straight men, these knights wear a lot of silly hats.)

The style to the Texas Trilogy may seem old-fashioned, but its lopeyness captures a certain essential Lone Star quality. I wonder if the Tuna Tetralogy could have existed without its mix of reverie and the innate quirkiness of Texans, which these actors generally are well-equipped to convey.

Davies, looking and sounding eerily like Cotton from King of the Hill, has mastered the tic of old age with disturbing accuracy, and Birkhead nicely embodies a weird innocence about the club. Moore goes for mugging more than the real desperation of dipsomania, but there’s also droll comic work from Grammer and Nye Cooper.

But the best performance is by Don Long as L.D., the grand poobah of the knights. L.D. is the one who gets that the club is through, although the real death came not from the loss of a meeting space but from the antiquated ideas of segregation and hatred its represented. It’s a fitting chapter-closer, wistful yet resolute. If only hatred was so easily snuffed out in real life.