Southern belles A poignant trip to Graceland BY BILL RODRIGUEZ
	Graceland and Other Tales Directed by Cait Calvo. With Sharon Coleman, Melissa Pennick, Deb McGowan, Katie Cabral, and Krista Weller. At Firehouse Theater through September 26.

It’s the right time to make a transition from lighthearted summer fare to the regular fall theater season, when things get serious again. Graceland and Other Tales, at Firehouse Theater in Newport, provides some of both theatrical flavors.

Five 10-minute monologues and a longer one-act are directed by Cait Calvo, the producer of NewStage who brought us Blithe Spirit and Oleanna earlier this year.

Ellen Byron’s Graceland follows the warm-up acts and manages the same blend of funny-with-a-soupçon-of-poignant that its namesake accomplishes unintentionally. We are at Elvis’s Memphis mansion three days before it is to first open to the public, in the company of two of the King’s self-anointed Greatest Fans. They each argue that they were there first, and each wants truly, madly, deeply, to be the first to pay homage to their god.

Yeah, the premise is a little off-putting, but these Southern-fried characters — and the terrific portrayals — easily seduce us into sympathy. Bev (Katie Cabral) is an old veteran of all things Elvis, the first in line for the unveiling of his memorial and other such events. She has every Elvis liquor bottle ever turned into a statue, having dedicated her life to him since she was 15. Her truck-driver husband doesn’t mind her obsession because it’s better than worrying about her pursuing flesh-and-blood men.

Rootie (Krista Weller) is a young woman, a walking encyclopedia of Elvisania, from little-known biographical facts to recording dates. She holds up the mask of her elaborate make-up like a shield, since her mean snake of a husband says she’s ugly without it. Rootie’s Elvis-impersonating brother was killed in Vietnam, so she is perpetuating his memory, keeping him alive, this way.

Though we learn a lot about Elvis, old swivel-hips is just the MacGuffin here. The real offering is a double portrait of two Southern archetypes: the brazen show-off and the trailer-trash sweetheart. Cabral makes Bev brassy without letting her get obnoxious, and she carefully balances Bev’s no-nonsense toughness with a soft heart. Weller gives Rootie more than the puppy-dog frailty that makes Bev feel sorry for her. She gets across the strength of character lurking under all that Maybelline, convincing us that Rootie’s coming to Memphis was an arrival rather than an escape. Playwright Byron keeps things sentimental, but these two actors get beyond the obvious opportunities to give us a sense of real people on the stage.

The evening opens on a heart-tugging note with Jane Martin’s Glass Marbles. Sharon Coleman is a daughter whose mother has recently died, and is here to tell us about the old woman’s last brave days. The playwright paints a picture of a tough-upper-lip, good-humored matriarch. The woman takes to bed after the joke-indulgence of $1200-worth of nightgowns. She refers to her pain only as "chills." Coleman goes for our tears here, however, which can make us reluctant to relinquish any. She’s more effective in Martin’s Marks, in which a formerly passive middle-aged woman decides that she doesn’t want her epitaph to read, "She lived as she thought she might be told to." Instead, the woman starts recording a venturesome life on her skin, beginning with a knife scar and continuing with tattoos.

Melissa Penick delivers another monologue by the pseudonymous Martin, long assumed to be Jon Jory, the former head of Actors Theatre of Louisville. In The Handler, she grapples snakes in the Holiness Church. Bitten seven times, she remains unafraid. Penick nails the urgent spirit of the character, who realizes that that is what the snakes are sensing. The actor uses a different facet of that joie de vivre in Don Nigro’s Ophelia. She delivers my favorite line of the evening — "Death is remembrance: a kind of quiet theater" — as Hamlet’s main squeeze tells all about their dalliance and the real reason she took the plunge.

Deb McGowan is deliciously entertaining in Martin’s Fifteen Minutes, reflecting on things theatrical as she puts on her make-up before a performance. An evening of "lacerating self-exposure" is in store, the character says, complaining that "it’s hard to be entertainment for people you’ve never seen before." McGowan handles this with buoyant levity, which not only stands in ironic contrast with the impending lacerations but also rescues the scene from potential sarcasm: this monologue could be delivered with an undercurrent of resentment, as the actor suggests that audiences prepare a program containing biographical information, from favorite color to sexual preferences.

Six for six. Not a bad evening in the theater any time of the year.