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"Everyone has an uncle like Daniel, " Edna Earle Ponder tells us in the opening moments of this marvelous
send up of Eudora Welty's The Ponder Heart. From the first scenes, which reveal the bustling and tiny Clay, Mississippi, circa the 1930's, my audience of students and I were captured. Jo Beth
Williams, as the ever bossy and observant Edna Earle, carried just the right authenticity in her voice to convince us that she was genuine, not the overtly drawling, pretend-southern heroine Hollywood often serves
up. Williams' Edna Earle makes the perfect, self-sacrificing and doting companion for her own Uncle Daniel (played by a quietly hilarious Peter MacNicol), who becomes her ward and total responsibility after Papa
Ponder's heart just gives out on him. Daniel is genuinely good-natured and very rich. He also has a habit of giving away whatever he
has at hand: hats and pins, service stations and motocycles, even his inheritance. So, when Papa Ponder confides to Edna Earle, "I'm about to get strick [a particularly southern pronunciation]
with your Uncle Daniel," in an attempt to teach Daniel some responsibility, we immediately suspect that Papa may not have an easy time of it. Thankfully, Mr. Ponder doesn't live to witness the real scrape that results from his machinations. When Daniel's child bride Bonnie Dee just up and dies, and the local district attorney decides to help his own political career by going after the high and mighty Ponders, the twists and turns of plot are dizzying. At times they get downright silly, as when Bonnie Dee spends her days playing jacks or when Uncle Daniel fires his attorney, named Tadpole. Yet, there is something believably human in all that occurs. The story touches a bit on the grotesque and the ridiculous, as southern literature will, but after all the fireworks and speechifying are done, we have a sense that life in Clay will go on in the future as it has in the past.
Having grown up in small southern town, I can bear witness to the fact that not everyone has an uncle just like Daniel. However, we probably all do know someone with a relative sort of like him --a
Cousin Edward or an Aunt Maude, who is kind and goodhearted, but just "not right." The American Collection's The Ponder Heart
does dramatic justice to Welty's characters and to her story. It highlights a charming element of the South, our Uncle Daniels, whom we let sit on the front porch and speak for themselves. The results, in this case, are delightful.
Barbara Lipe teaches English at Alexander High School in Georgia. |
