Last Resort Trailer Park

Combine a handful of talented local character actors with a light, character-based comedy and the result is this laughfest full of, well, character.

Local playwright Laura Sheperd, who won an Elly Award for her drama Annie’s Story, tries her hand at comedy—and what a handful it turns out to be. The residents of the Last Resort Trailer Park, a single-wide haven on the rough side of Winnemucca, Nev., attracts the rough-and-tumble sort of folks who didn’t quite have the luck for Las Vegas or Reno. In spite of the way most of them seem to enjoy having a brew and a blowout down at Bubba’s, the barbecue place on the highway, they don’t really cause much trouble. But strait-laced trailer-park manager Rhonda (Gloria Jones) does have plenty to look down her nose at, especially when Deputy Hank Trimble (Charley Cross) comes around asking questions about the live-in boyfriend of one of her tenants.

Sheperd’s script presents a minor mystery—who was it that stole a truck and broke into a house on the nice side of town—as a means to unleash the sort of womanly friendship, laughter-through-tears comedy familiar to fans of plays and films like Steel Magnolias and Fried Green Tomatoes. The flashy Nadine (Noemi C. Rios, a veteran who knows how to restore the angel’s wings to a fallen woman) and the even flashier Charline (Paula Campanella) have their long-standing friendship tested by Nadine’s ne’er-do-well (and ne’er-do-work) boyfriend (played with the appropriate beery haze by Keith Letl).

This is no comedy of manners, but rather a hoot at the lack of them, and further proof that local playwrights have at least as much to offer as our local actors.