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

by Joan Arbery of of Renegade Bus

Robert Frost’s poems haunt with their New England sparseness, often telling the tale of quiet revenge. Almost always within his poems, “the code” of one’s culture overrides and subsumes the individual agent. In The Code, the boss of a haying farm acts the big man to his subordinate, and his subordinate, knowing his boss has broken a code, attempts to kill him. He doesn’t succeed, but the boss gets the point — he’s been rightly shamed for disrespecting the code and cannot seek justice.

There’s a similar code-breaking (although not as dire) in Preston Jones’ Texan play, The Last Meeting of the Knights of the White Magnolia, playing at the Contemporary Theatre of Dallas under Rene Moreno’s direction. While Jones’ southern “knights” (a whites-only group) — ranging from working class mechanics to white-collar businessmen — all insist on following the code (bending it slightly for the sake of whiskey) to initiate their newest member in years, their literal code of membership is no match for an underlying, unspoken code that could bind them together. Because they have no such bond, their induction is a failure.

At heart, Jones’ play is nostalgic for a core code even as it abolishes segregationism in the 1960s. The stooping, shuffling black janitor Ramsey-Eyes (Kenne Sparks), and the aging, white, wheelchair-bound Colonel Kincaid (John S. Davies), grasp a deeper, mythical code in their compassionate interactions with one another — one that transcends racial differences. They understand what Faulkner calls “the old verities.” L. D. Alexander (Don Long), the Magnolias’ Imperial Wizard, seems to think that his minutes-oriented club can replace these old bonds with schmaltzy rituals, but while his hero-worship for the Magnolias’ founder, Stemco, is reverent, it never approximates the principles of hospitality that shape Ramsey-Eyes and Kincaid’s code.

Director Moreno’s gift in this production is to bring out the highly comic exchanges between the band of Magnolias — from the frenetic, Christian Slaterish Skip (Kevin Moore), who just wants a guzzle of whiskey, to the retreating, gormless newbie, Lonnie (Trey Birkhead), to the embittered and caustic businessman, Red Grover (Kevin Grammer). The men vary in their affinities for one another, but share a bent for booze. The entire cast plays off each other with considerable quickness and energy, exhibiting a delivery that rarely falls flat.

Yet Moreno’s true success in this staging comes less from the humor, which is palpable enough, and more from the chaotic ravings he sees from Davies’ Kincaid. Shell-shocked from the First World War, Kincaid’s mind begins to unravel throughout the course of the vociferous meeting, and he begins to recount bloody episodes from Europe’s trenches. During these ramblings, it’s Ramsey-Eyes he wants, not the haranguing palaver of his White Magnolia brethren. The Magnolias slowly erode alongside Kincaid’s descent into incoherence. They can’t shore themselves up against the loss of the hotel in which they meet (owned by Kincaid) or against the fact that a black man is Kincaid’s truest friend. When both Kincaid and the Magnolias exit the premises, Ramsey-Eyes’ own code takes over.

If Jones ends the play in laughter, he also condemns the nonsense of noble lies as seen through Ramsey-Eyes’ reason. The Last Meeting may not haunt, but thanks to Moreno’s able direction, it questions and reveals the haints of our modern era.