To kick off their fall 2013 season, this weekend the Brandeis Ensemble Theater performed American playwright James McLure's 1959 Pink Thunderbird. The play dissects the themes of hope and complacency in the small Texas town of Maynard and is told in two acts, "Laundry & Bourbon" and "Lone Star." While 1959 Pink Thunderbird is only a side project for BET and featured a small cast of only six undergraduate students, the production warranted a stellar finished production.

The performances were staged in Ridgewood Commons, which posed a unique challenge: how to perform a two-act, almost two-hour-long play that was composed entirely of conversations in an untraditional space. The two sets-one for each act-were minimalistic, although thoughtful, and reflected the attributes and lives of the characters who inhabited them. "Laundry & Bourbon" was up first, featuring female characters of 1970s Maynard: Hattie, Elizabeth and Amy Lee. Set in Elizabeth's living room, the black backdrop was fronted by a few rustic metal chairs, a television set, a basket of laundry with some clothing hung on a line and a bar cart topped with a sizeable bottle of bourbon. At intermission, the crew speedily dismantled the "Laundry & Bourbon" set and reassembled the space for "Lone Star." This second act was set right outside the town joint, Angel's Bar, with a couple of benches and a six-pack of beer situated on the ground for the late-night conversations between the Maynard men Ray, Roy and Cletus.

1959 Pink Thunderbird is haunted by a ghost character, so to speak, from which it gains its title-a 1959 pink Thunderbird car owned by Elizabeth's husband Roy, a remnant of his glory days in high school, and simple times before he went away to fight in Vietnam for two years. In "Laundry & Bourbon," best friends Elizabeth, played by Kiana Nwaobia '17 and Hattie, played by Page Smith '17, lament the passing of the idyllic days of their youth, when all was simple and they were each happily in love.

Every character talks about the Thunderbird in the same way that Jay Gatsby talks about the green light at the end of his love's dock in F. Scott Fitzgerald's novel The Great Gatsby-as a romantic symbol of what has passed, expressing an overwhelming desire to keep living in the past. "You know, sometimes I think he loves that car more than me," Elizabeth says wistfully of Roy to Hattie at the beginning of the play. Hattie answers, "It's just a car," but Elizabeth says again, "Yeah, but he says it can take him where he wants to go." The two keep on waxing poetic until Amy Lee, played by Morgan Winters '17, pays a visit and a rocky history between the group of women causes the truth about their relationships and lives to come out. Winters and Smith built up a fantastic dynamic on stage, bantering back and forth with dry one-liners and backing up their lines with an array of expressive body language, ranging from subtle smirks to even a chase around the stage. Nwaobia balanced this pair well, maintaining an emotional composure and providing a comic sensibility through disagreements between her two stage-mates.

The storyline established in "Laundry & Bourbon" carries over into "Lone Star," where the women's husbands commiserate about their troubles. Roy, played by Aaron Fineberg '15, has just returned from Vietnam, and the act opens into his very drunken night as he shares a beer with his brother Ray, played by Isaac Rabbani '14. Roy is filled with rage and regret, heightened by his drunkenness, and Fineberg enacts this in a manner that is both hilarious and effective by moving across the stage in the most manic of ways. Amy Lee's husband Cletis, played by Steven Kline '14, in an act of uncharacteristic boldness actually crashes and destroys Roy's Thunderbird, and Kline demonstrates the timidity and apologetic manner of Cletis well as he delivers lines to Ray with stress and concern. Rabbani balances the polarized emotional characters of Roy and Cletis as he urges Roy to reflect and to move on through acts of comic relief.

As the play comes to a close, Ray is finally able to get through to the still drunk Roy, who grandly proclaims, "Well, we all got to grow up sometimes, Roy," a perfectly sentimental ending to a play fraught with regret, contemplation and uncertainty.