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Random acts of keenness

By Rich Copley rcopley@herald-leader.com

Who needs methamphetamines when you can have government economic development grants? That's the philosophy that the residents of Random, Ky., a little town up in a holler, developed in playwright Elizabeth Orndorff's mind.

Like many of the Danville author's stories and plays, the idea came from reading the newspaper. In this case, it was a story in the Danville Advocate-Messenger about a man who jumped off a bridge but missed the water and landed in mud. It started as a short story Orndorff published.

"I don't know if he was trying to kill himself or not, but he jumped off the bridge and missed the water," Orndorff says from her home. "I took that incident and wrote a back story about what could have happened in his life to bring him to that point.

"Then, I created a girlfriend and various characters, and when I finished, and it was published, I said, 'I really like these characters, this Jerry Peavler guy.' So, I said, I'm just going to convert this into a play and build a larger story around it."

Danville's West T. Hill Community Theatre gets the first crack at that script, Hollerwood, in a production that plays the next two weekends.

For Orndorff, it's the second of three scripts she will have produced in Danville in less than a year.

The streak started early in the summer when Pioneer Playhouse produced Death by Darkness, Orndorff's slingshot of a murder mystery that knocked off several whodunit giants to win the inaugural International Mystery Writers' Festival in 2007. In late April, West T. Hill will present the world premiere of Orndorff's drama The Spring Cleaning.

If she's not the most prolific playwright in Danville, she certainly has the highest profile.

Orndorff says the award from the Owensboro-based mystery fest might have helped get her new scripts on stage at West T. Hill. But referring to the theater's director, she says, "If Karen Logue hadn't liked my scripts, they wouldn't have been done."

With Hollerwood, which was a runner-up for the Southeastern Theatre Conference Getchell New Play Award, Orndorff gets to guide her words to the stage.

"I kind of wanted to do this because it's a comedy and I had a real sense of what I wanted to do since there were a lot of physical things," Orndorff says. "It's been kind of fun because I can change things, and I don't have to write to anybody for permission.

"If it's a funny script to begin with, it's 10 times funnier once the actors have gotten a hold of it."

The story centers on the residents of Random, who decide to give up the numerous illegal ways to make some cash — moonshine, drugs — and instead try to go legit, sort of.

"It might be called a racket," Orndorff says. "But they have figured out how to utilize government economic development grants, and they put on a play for the tourists as down-and-out, ignorant hillbillies, because that's what the tourists like to see.

"And they have writers' conferences and get untenured professors from UK to come in and teach writing, so they just do a number on the big city."

They also sell faux moonshine and folk art to their unsuspecting visitors.

The matriarch of the Dean family, Babe, sets the writers' conference in her house in Random, so she tricks people like a beleaguered University of Kentucky professor to come to the event by billing it as the Random House Writers' Conference.

"It's a lot of what's fake and what isn't fake and who are the smart ones?" Orndorff says.

And under Orndorff's pen, Random probably will live on.

"I like this town," she says. "I want to go back."