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Review: 'The Oldest Living Graduate'

BY STEVE PARKS | steve.parks@newsday.com

April 4, 2008

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Nearly 20 years after his death following surgery at age 43, the hotshot career of Preston Jones is largely forgotten outside his native Texas. Once hailed as king of American regional theater and the next Tennessee Williams (whose agent brought Jones' acclaimed "Texas Trilogy" to Broadway), Jones enjoyed literary celebrity, his face adorning national magazine covers.

But New York critics were not kind, and today few works from his high-riding six-year run as a playwright are revived outside his home region.

Which makes Hampton Theatre Company's resurrection of the last in Jones' trilogy, "The Oldest Living Graduate," a rare rediscovery. James Ewing, cofounder of the Hamptons' leading off-season theater company, brings back to irascible life Col. J.C. Kincaid, who is the last survivor of the class of 1905 from Mirabeau B. Lamar Military Academy in Galveston, Texas. His son Floyd wants to cash in on the colonel's distinguished longevity by inviting the academy brass - and some of its brassiest alumni - to a ceremony honoring his father. Floyd's ulterior motive is measured by the acre - one-acre lots on the colonel's lakeside property the son hopes to turn into summer estates and a marina. The invitees, retired generals and governors among them, would be his first buyers.

Not that Floyd needs the money. The colonel's ranch on the desolate outskirts of Bradleyville, a nowhere town the interstate bypassed, has every Kincaid set for life. But Floyd needs, no, he craves a purpose.

As directed by Sarah Hunnewell, "The Oldest Living Graduate" crackles with the entitlement of age. From his wheelchair, Ewing's colonel can say anything and get away with it.

Todd Reichart's swaggering Floyd bolsters our sympathy for the old man with his selfish pleading and underappreciation of his wife, Maureen (Jessica Ellwood), who cares for the men in her life with the acerbic patience of a woman who knows she's smarter than anyone in the room - especially Floyd's business partner and his bimbo bride (Matthew O'Connor and Jessica Howard).

Besides his spot-on portrayal of the colonel - who has us buying into his outrageous insults - Ewing re-creates a "Dallas"-style ranch-house set, accented by a liquor cabinet that doubles as a gun rack.

It's enough to make you hanker for the other two-thirds of the Jones trilogy.

THE OLDEST LIVING GRADUATE. By Preston Jones. Hampton Theatre Company at Quogue Community Hall, Jessup Avenue, Quogue, through April 13. Tickets $22, 631-653-8955. Seen Sunday.

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