It's been a sordid career for Del Shores, whose play, movie, and television series Sordid Lives attached that disreputable description to his work �" a franchise he furthered by touring in three one-man shows that all worked Sordid into their titles. He has plans for two more Sordid Lives movies before calling it a day for that title nearly eight years after an unheralded stage play grew into a phenomenon that pushes at the limits of the adjective "cult."
While Shores' more recent plays have eschewed Sordid, their titles still suggest a campy Southern sensibility. But Shores said, despite the titles, The Trials and Tribulations of a Trailer Trash Housewife and Southern Baptist Sissies have been treading darker waters, a path he continues in his new play Yellow. New Conservatory Theatre Center is returning to Shores territory, with Yellow coming nearly 10 years after the theater presented Southern Baptist Sissies.
"When the Los Angeles Times reviewed Yellow, it basically said that Del Shores takes a huge departure from what we're used to, and this critic wonders if his fans will take the journey with him. One of my favorite moments in L.A. was when we had an older matinee audience, the lights went down on the first act, and this woman very loudly said, 'Well, I didn't see that coming.' I thought, good, I did my job."
Through most of its first act, Yellow plays out as a family comedy with suggestions of a bumpier ride ahead. Bobby and Kate, the parents of two teenagers, are still giddily in love, while their son Dayne is a likable star athlete and their daughter Gracie is a precocious drama-club brat. An unofficial fifth member of the family is another drama geek, best friends with the daughter while harboring a huge crush on her brother. Kendall spends a lot of time in the second home, escaping the wrath of his frighteningly religious mother, who thinks Kendall is damned to hell for a taking a role in the school production of Oklahoma!
The story involves a huge twist, and for the most part critics have respected the limits of responsible revelation. "I just say an illness creates a situation where a 19-year-old secret is revealed," Shores said, with some of the information coming early enough in the play that it can be said that it is the high school athlete who is ailing, a situation providing the gay-but-virginal Kendall a chance to happily play nursemaid to his hero. At one point, Kendall even acts out a condensed version of Kiss of the Spider Woman for his bedridden friend, complete with "the kiss."
Before starting writing Yellow, several experiences kept resurfacing in Shores' mind, and he began playing a "what if" game with the events. "I knew a couple like Bobby and Kate, and I was privy to a secret in their relationship. I have another friend who had the disease that I gave to Dayne, and I played what-if there had to be a match with a rare blood type. And the third component was when I found out one of my best friends had killed himself. He had been damaged by religion, and he hung himself after a night of drinking and after his mother told him he had never been anything but a disappointment to her. I said at his memorial that I would create a play with a character named Kendall, and let him have a refuge family like Kendall does in this play."
In his own family growing up in Texas, Shores had both refuge and brimstone in his home. His father was a Southern Baptist pastor who preached sin and damnation from the pulpit and in the home, while his mother was a drama teacher who was opening up to him the magic world of theater. But the father's message triumphed, and Shores did not come out until his 30s, after a marriage that produced two daughters. A second marriage, to Jason Dottley, ended in divorce a few years ago.
Shores found his detour into one-man shows and standup comedy as a kind of healing for a series of personal travails. The single season of Sordid Lives on the Logo cable network ended in acrimony. "I was basically under contract to a person I was suing," he said, "and then your husband leaves you, so there was something very wonderful about standing on stage hearing laughter and applause. It was all very therapeutic, and fortunately it was therapy that was actually earning me money."
Yellow will run at New Conservatory Theatre Center through March 23. Tickets are $25-$45. Call 861-8972 or go to www.nctcsf.org.