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DALLAS Preston Jones lifts the brim of his Stetson and undramatically blows his nose. It's hay‐fever time and the rainy season in Dallas, and Jones, like most Dallasites, is an annual victim of these dismal rites of spring.
“What's good for a cold?” he asks Lynn Trammell, the Dallas Theater Center's publicist. “Bourbon? Scotch? Vodka? Gin?” Jones's deep voice echoes nasally in the small lounge near the Theater Center's stage. “None of those sound good to me right now,” he grumbles through his handkerchief. He is slumped in a chair, looking tired and at least 10 years older than 41.
When Miss Trammell finds that the liquor cabinet is securely padlocked, no sounds are heard for a long moment except the thunderstorm outside and the playwright glumly sniffing.
Enter the center's technical director, Yoichi Aoki, bearing—deus ex machina —a massive pair of bolt cutters. Medicinal vodka tonics are served, and Jones, brightened by the burglary, accepts his with mock fear. “Paul Baker [the center's director] will come in here later and ask, ‘Who broke the lock off the hooch? Preston Jones? That's strike three for him !’ ”
But Jones, of course, is in no danger of being fired from the Dallas Theater Center. He is its “assistant literary consultant;” his wife, Mary Sue, is assistant director; and his newest play, “Santa Fe Sunshine,” concluded its premiere engagement there yesteday. He also is the subject of a KERA‐TV special, “The Stages of Preston Jones,” to be aired nationally May 31 on PBS.
Since “A Texas Trilogy” closed on Broadway last fall after 63 performances, Jones says, “I've been working. Oh my God, I've been working, pal. I redid my play, ‘A Place on the Magdalena Flats,’ and had it shown in Santa Fe. I've finished ‘Santa Fe Sunshine.’ I've been out to California to work with Hal Wallis on a screenplay based on ‘A Texas Trilogy.’ And I've written an article for the Dramatists’ Guild Quarterly.
“I've been hard at it,” he went on. “I've been to nine opening nights of my plays in the past year, and I've written five plays in the past three years. That's too many. The wife wants to haul me away on a long vacation to Tasmania—to Ireland, actually. I really ought to lay out for a while, but I've got at least a year's work lined up before I can get to my next plays.”
Jones terms his newest work “a pure fun satire.” “Santa Fe Sunshine” is a two‐act comedy set in the New Mexico art community during the late 1950's. Failed expectations and the ravages of time, two prominent themes in “A Texas Trilogy,” provide poignant laughs this time as two aging artists finally realize the worth of their long struggles with the muses.
The action occurs in the adobe house of Gino Bruno, a genial but untalented sculptor who believes he has finally created his greatest masterpiece. Bruno's best friend, however, an equally untalented painter named Claude Nordley, hates everything except hate itself and a cheap wine named Santa Fe Sunshine. Nordley refuses to look at Bruno's sculpture until it is finally unveiled at a disastrous party attended by a rich hillbilly art patron, a homosexual poet, a scheming gallery owner, a would‐be writer and his wouldbe‐folksinger girl friend, and a woodcarver skilled only at faking New Mexican artifacts.
Audience reactions were strongly favorable, but Dallas theater critics gave “Santa Fe Sunshine” mixed reviews. John Neville of the Dallas Morning News, who lived amid the Santa Fe art community in the 1950's, said the play “rings true to life” and called it a “perceptive and very successful comedy.” John Bloom of the Dallas TimesHerald dismissed it as “a frivolous patchwork of gags, stereotypes and situation‐comedy humor.”
Jones will snipe back at reviewers he feels are “not what I consider real theater critics.” He respects several, but will not name them. And he will ignore anyone who harps at him to become an Aeschylus of the sagebrush. He foresees a time when he may attempt deeper pronouncements about life, but for now he reiterates, “I just write stories. There are no hidden meanings, no cleverly disguised symbolism, no messages I'm dying to get across.”
“But I will not adhere to one kind of playwriting,” he adds. “Hell, I might write a children's play next, or a fantasy.”
Most likely, Jones's next play will be another comedy —“Darts at Pat's.” “This one sounds vey Irish, but it's set in Dallas,” he said. “I've got a wealth of material for it.” One of Jones's favorite relaxations, in fact, is throwing darts in Dallas's only semi‐Irish pub, the NFL, a few blocks from the Theater Center. And his tosses are tough to beat. In younger days, he played semi‐pro baseball, and he still uses occasional baseball analogies when talking about playwriting.
What he most enjoyed about Broadway, he says, was “going there with the same cast that had played at the Kennedy Center, in Washington. They were all New York actors, so this was their home ballpark. We had come up from the minors, and now we were playing in the big leagues as purely an expansion team. And my biggest disappointment in the New York reaction to the trilogy was how it affected the cast. Being the new boy there, being such a novice, I don't think it hit me as hard as it did them.”
What did he learn from the “Trilogy” experience? “I feel that I'm better equipped to deal with agents and producers now,” he said, “and I feel that I've become a better and more professional writer because of what I went through.
“But we didn't exactly close overnight, you know.” He lifts his empty glass in a salute to New York, blows his nose again, and grins. “Hell, we were the longest running Texas trilogy in history.”