It’s a small curiosity that London is hosting the world premiere of Possum Trot, a one-act play by American writer Kathy Rucker. It joins a handful of American-authored premieres in London this year, from Samuel D. Hunter’s Clarkston, with its own exploration of small-town identity, to Eric Roth’s High Noon, a mythic reworking of the classic Western. Whatever the reason for their debuts on our shores, there’s something quietly gratifying about a pub theatre making room for this comedy-drama that takes a heartfelt look at the decline unfolding in rural America.
Rucker’s story is set in a small-town Midwestern diner run by Maxine, played with tender grit by Sarah Berger. Maxine talks directly to her late husband’s photograph and dispenses homespun wisdom to her daughter Pru (Dani Arlington) and granddaughter Billie (Neve Francis). Both restaurateur and town mayor, Maxine is gently courted by Duane (Todd Boyce) and trades shots of whiskey with her son-in-law Jeremiah (Nikolas Salmon), who is quietly losing the battle to keep the family farm alive. Salmon brings a gentle poignancy to the tension between preserving his family’s legacy and imagining a future built around what he loves.
Rucker’s empathy for the pressures on small American farmers is evident, as is her heartache over the erosion of community-minded rural life. But the abundance of crises — from unwanted pregnancies and mental-health worries, to torrential storms, bank refinancing and even farm animals in improbably wrong places — can pull focus from the characters themselves, who might benefit from a little more room to emerge.
The themes are admirable, even urgent, yet the characters carrying them don’t always come into focus. Their private and public revelations can feel mis-timed and overly staged. The cast work hard to find deeper characterisations — and although the play’s crowded storyline leaves director Scott Le Crass with little space to develop more depth, he doesn’t quite find a path through its tangle of threads.
Billie, meanwhile, is glued to her phone, posting videos of small-town life that unexpectedly go viral, and dreaming of escaping to art school in Los Angeles — a dream she ultimately achieves, joined, somewhat randomly, by both Duane and Maxine. At times the play struggles to find a unifying focus, and closes on one of Duane’s jokes, giving the finale a lightness that feels at odds with the weightier themes it introduces — a missed chance for a more satisfying conclusion.
Some of the staging choices feel awkward, especially a tornado-shelter sequence in which the cast huddle tableau-like in the basement, lit from below by handheld lamps that leave them oddly static. The set is extremely bare — even for a black-box pub theatre — and the actors seem confined by the limited playing area. Small gestures of diner life — the wiped glass, a plate passed across the counter — never quite create the lived-in authenticity the production is aiming for.
Possum Trot has laudable aspirations and its heartbreak for the decline of America’s rural communities is sincere. It’s a play overflowing with intention and compassion, even if it can’t quite bring its many ambitions into sharp dramatic focus.
By: Kathy Rucker
Director: Scott Le Crass
Cast: Dani Arlington, Sarah Berger, Todd Boyce, Neve Francis, Nikolas Salmon
Until 29th November
Running time: 75 minutes without intermission
Photo credit: Bonnie Britain