the plays to be produced wasThe Last Meeting of the Knights of the White Magnolia. The plot of the play is very simple: The members of a social lodge gather for their monthly meeting, expecting the usual evening of drinking and playing dominoes, only to find the last remnants of the dying fraternal order disintegrate during the evening as they attempt to initiate their first new member in more than five years. Neither the individual members nor the lodge itself, with its basic ideals of white supremacy and unquestioning patriotism, has been able to adjust to the social changes of the late 1950’s and early 1960’s.

Although Jones ridicules the ludicrous aspects of such fraternal orders—the mystical ceremonies, the pointless rules and regulations—and while he never excuses his characters’ basic ignorance and bigotry, he presents sympathetically their need for companionship and sense of community and their fears and confusions at the potential loss of these values. The play is uproariously funny, but it never loses sight of the basic humanity of the characters, each of which is etched with depth and precision. The most memorable figure is that of Colonel J. C. Kinkaid, a shell-shocked veteran of World War I whose physical and mental deterioration during the course of the evening graphically parallels the dissolution of the group and, in a broader sense, of the Bradleyville way of life.

Lu Ann Hampton Laverty Oberlander

While The Last Meeting of the Knights of the White Magnolia presents a general view of Bradleyville, Jones’s second play concentrates more closely on a single character. Lu Ann Hampton Laverty Oberlander begins in 1953, when its title character is a bubbly but dissatisfied eighteen-year-old cheerleader, and traces her life over a twenty-year period. Eager to leave her hometown and see the world, Lu Ann never gets any farther than a trailer park in a nearby town, but she survives a divorce, her second husband’s death, her brother’s alcoholism, and her mother’s debilitating illness, and she achieves a kind of quiet dignity through her acceptance of her fate. A failure by most standards, Lu Ann is seen by Jones as a survivor, worthy of sympathy and praise. Lu Ann Hampton Laverty Oberlander also traces the life of Skip Hampton, a character introduced in The Last Meeting of the Knights of the White Magnolia. As Lu Ann grows in strength and dignity, her brother degenerates from an optimistic but ineffectual schemer to a painfully dependent alcoholic. The plot of Lu Ann Hampton Laverty Oberlander, with its careful symmetry, is perhaps too contrived, but the characters are memorable and the dialogue compares well with that of Jones’s other plays. In a typically realistic and poignant sample of Jones’s language, Skip notes how ironic it is “when all that stands between a man and the by-God loony bin is his sister’s tab down to the Dixie Dinette.”

The Oldest Living Graduate

The last play of the trilogy, The Oldest Living Graduate, focuses on Colonel Kinkaid, who, as he did in The Last Meeting of the Knights of the White Magnolia, reflects the values and attitudes of the past. His distrust of business, his love for the land, and his insistence on salvaging a small part of his past from the ravages of time place him in conflict with his son Floyd, the forward-looking local entrepreneur. The play looks with humor at the foibles and prejudices of Bradleyville’s country-club set and its small-town morality, at academic and military folderol, at the values of a lost way of life, at the conflicts between generations, and at death itself. The Oldest Living Graduate is the most sophisticated and finely crafted of the three plays that make up the trilogy. In it, Jones combines his skill at characterization with a more complex plot and achieves a level of poetry, particularly in the Colonel’s dialogue, that is unmatched in any of the earlier plays. The character of the Colonel is perhaps Jones’s finest achievement; it is a portrait that evokes sentiment without being sentimental, a feat achieved principally through the clarity and complexity of the Colonel’s language.

Although each of the plays of A Texas Trilogy stands as a completely independent unit, the three plays have been produced as a single work. In such a production, the events in the three stories are arranged chronologically, beginning with the first act of Lu Ann Hampton Laverty Oberlander. The Last Meeting of the Knights of the White Magnolia is played after the first half of The Oldest Living Graduate. The performance concludes with the rest of the Colonel’s story and the last two acts of Lu Ann Hampton Laverty Oberlander. Combining the plays in this way makes clear the intimate connection between the three works, which runs much deeper than the shared locale and characters, and reveals the novelistic aspect of Jones’s vision. The details of place and characters give the plays a solid basis in realism that becomes even clearer when the plays are seen together. The town of Bradleyville takes on a level of dense reality akin to that of William Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha County: The lives of the characters interweave with and reflect one another, as they often do in Faulkner’s fiction. Lu Ann and Colonel Kinkaid, in particular, take on new nuances as their stories are told together; the Colonel, who left Bradleyville and was destroyed by a war he never fully understood, is paralleled by Lu Ann, who remained at home and grew strong and forgiving by facing her troubles there. A Texas Trilogy, as a whole, has an import beyond the significance of any of the plays individually.

A Place on the Magdalena Flats

Jones’s later plays have not achieved the success of A Texas Trilogy. They share, however, the qualities that characterize that work. A Place on the Magdalena Flats was first produced in Dallas in 1976. It underwent substantial revision during later productions in New Mexico and Wisconsin in 1976 and 1979, respectively. The principal changes in the script were alterations in the plot that focused the play more clearly on the older brother, Carl. While improved, the final version is not completely satisfactory, because of the lack of resolution of the younger brother’s story. Although it contains rich humor, A Place on the Magdalena Flats is more restrained in mood than any of the trilogy plays. Again, characters deal in isolation with ghosts from their past, this time in the drought-stricken cattle country of New Mexico. The language of the play is particularly rich in poetic imagery and metaphor, marking a growing maturity in Jones’s writing.

Santa Fe Sunshine

With Santa Fe Sunshine and Juneteenth, the latter commissioned by the Actors’ Theatre of Louisville as one of a series of one-act plays on American holidays, Jones turned to pure comedy. Juneteenth is a rather thin play; the plot is weak, and the one-act form does not allow Jones time to develop his characters fully. Santa Fe Sunshine is actually an earlier work to which Jones returned after the success of A Texas Trilogy. It lacks the depth of Jones’s other plays, but it contains some delightfully eccentric characters and very witty dialogue. Set in Santa Fe, New Mexico, during the 1950’s when the city was a growing artist colony, the play gently ridicules the local beatniks, the patrons who know little about art, and the artists themselves, who are all in the business of making art for money’s sake, although they like to pretend otherwise.

Remember

Although Jones drew on his own experiences for all of his plays, his last play, Remember, contains the most obviously autobiographical material. Jones, like his leading character Adrian Blair, was graduated from high school in 1954, after spending some time at a Catholic boarding school. Also like Adrian, he began to reexamine his religious roots as he reached middle age. Adrian is a second-rate actor who finds himself playing a dinner theater in his hometown on his fortieth birthday. He has avoided the town, and his past, for twenty years. Now he finds that little of what he remembers is left: His old home is gone, his friends have changed, his former teacher, Brother Anthony, has left the order and become a real-estate salesman. As Adrian tries to go back in time and rediscover values he has lost—religion, friendship, love—he finds that the world he once knew exists, in fact, only in his memory. When his former sweetheart offers the possibility of renewing their love, he rejects her, preferring the past to the present with its shifting values and lack of continuity.

Although Remember clearly deals with the themes that preoccupied Jones in all of his plays, it also represents a new direction in Jones’s writing. Although the geographical location of the play remains the Southwest, the characters are better educated and more self-aware than the inhabitants of Bradleyville. This shift allows Jones a use of literary allusion and metaphor that the more limited experience of his earlier characters prohibited, and his dialogue becomes even richer and more lyric with this addition. This enhanced language, combined with Jones’s usual depth of character and his engaging wit, places Remember among his finest achievements.