It was conceived as a skit for a friend’s party over 27 years ago. Actors Joe Sears and Jaston Williams, drawing on their mutual histories in little Western towns, delivered dispatches from reactionary radio station OKKK based in some Panhandle conservative bastion. Their clever political satire poked fun at the Moral Majority movement of the early 1980s and was a hit with the partygoers.

Then the theater company that brought them to Austin unexpectedly closed and Joe and Jaston needed a gig. At the urging of friends, they developed their sketch into a play populated with eccentric characters from Tuna the “third smallest town in Texas.” Their good friend Ed Howard collaborated on the first script, directed the pair, and took every bit of his $10,000 in savings to mount the first production of Greater Tuna.

It is an understatement to say that it proved extremely popular with the locals. They extended numerous times and even received a rave review in Variety. In just a year after opening in a small theatre on 6th Street in Austin, Greater Tuna opened off-Broadway where it ran for a year. Within three years, Norman Lear turned it into an HBO special. The following year, Greater Tuna was performed at the prestigious American Spoleto Festival in Charleston and the Edinburgh International Festival in Scotland. In its fifth year, Greater Tuna became the most performed play in the country. They created a sequel, A Tuna Christmas, and by the end of Tuna’s first decade, it moved to Broadway and Joe Sears was nominated for a Tony.

In 1998, Red, White and Tuna premiered, completing the Tuna trilogy. For the previous 17 years, Joe and Jaston spent most of each year touring. When they packed up this time, it seemed that this would be the final installment of the wacky comings and goings of the assorted characters—men, women and animals—of Tuna, Texas. The strain of being on the road and away from their families had taken its toll. It was time for a time out from Tuna.

Throughout the years, each maintained close ties with the Austin theater community. When not on their whirlwind Tuna touring schedule, they worked individually on other projects or escaped to recharge—Joe to Wyoming and Jaston to New Orleans. Yet, they just couldn’t let Tuna go. Now, a decade later, there’s a new, fourth installment of Tuna. This time they’re producing it on their own.

“We thought we needed to take more control,” Jaston explained. “We saw this as a way of starting over. We didn’t want to do anything derivative and we wanted to have fun with it. We’d been in a harness for a long time and we’d lost the fun.”

Vegas seemed like a place where the cast of Tuna characters could go wild and in the process Joe, Jaston and Ed Howard could rediscover the joy that spawned Greater Tuna in the first place. “Where we are as friends and collaborators is really where we were in the 1970s,” Jaston said. “It’s amazing. And now we are having fun.”

TUNA STRIP TEASE

In this fourth installment from the Greater Tuna creative team, the eccentric characters from the Lone Star state take a wild, irreverent ride through Sin City. It all begins when Tuna’s oddball-conservative radio host Arles Struvie announces on the air that he and his wife Bertha Bumiller are heading to Las Vegas to renew their wedding vows. One by one, the residents of the “third smallest town in Texas” find a reason to tag along.

The entire cast of 24 characters, of both genders and various ages, are played by two masters of character study, comedic timing and lightening-fast costume changes.

Joe Sears plays: Thurston Wheelis, Bertha Bumiller, Pearl Burras, Leonard Childers, Shot, Inita Goodwin, Joe Bob Lipsey, Carlotta, Captain Hooper, Fred, Ethel and Elvis II.

Jaston Williams plays: Arles Struvie, Didi Snavely, Petey Fisk, Charlene Bumiller, Hop-Sing, Mama Bird, Vera Carp, Helen Bedd, Anna Conda, Enrique, Maurice and Elvis I.

For Tuna Tidbits, click here.

Photos by Brenda Ladd

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