Family finds itself ‘Alone Together’ at Le Petit

For parents, it’s the time that is most sad and yet joyful, when the last of the children living at home leaves for good, allowing mother and father to embark on a new stage of life together.

Unless, that is, the children return home to live with mom and dad – this time all grown up.

That is the premise and the source of the laughs in “Alone Together,” the Los Angeles-set 1984 Lawrence Roman comedy being staged in September by Le Petit Theater de Terrebonne in downtown Houma.

Roman, who passed away last year at age 86, is best known for authoring the Broadway comedy “Under the Yum-Yum Tree” that was made into a 1963 movie with Jack Lemon. With “Alone Together,” he came up with a plot that has been compared more than once to an extended ’80s situation comedy, but with the room to explore the family’s comedic predicament that only theater can provide.

“The parents are two people who’ve been married for 30-something years,” said director Ouida Best. “Their youngest son is going to college and for the first time in 30 years they’ll be alone. They’re excited and sad, they look forward to what they can do without the children.”

The father, George (Scott Goodwin), and mother Helene (Robyn Hornsby), would like to travel now to places where they want to go. Helene had at one time spurned a scholarship offer to be an artist and wants to return to painting.

The idyll is shattered when their oldest son, Michael (Danny Pitre), returns home so unexpectedly from his job as a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology that George mistakes him for a burglar.

“He got discouraged when he didn’t solve a problem he wanted to solve,” Best said. “He comes home to lick his wounds.”

Middle son Elliot (stage newcomer Matt DeRoche) had lived in Texas before being tossed out of his home for engaging in extramarital acts.

“He apologized to his wife about a one-night stand,” Best said, believing he did the right thing. He was wrong.

Youngest son Keith (Brandon Dufrene), who doesn’t return until the end of the play, sends wife Janie (Lisa Cunningham) to live with his parents in his stead, which turns out to be a questionable move.

“Janie had been on her own,” Best said. “She’s an upbeat person, but cuckoo. She goes about scantily dressed. George thinks she should wear more clothes.”

All three are played partly as stereotypes. Absent-minded Michael has his experiments blow up on the patio and wants to bring his girlfriend in Cambridge home to live with him.

“He’s just out of touch,” Best said. “He’s brilliant, a gourmet cook.”

Elliot, although having a relatively short stay in Texas, returns to Los Angeles wearing hats and boots and nails steer horns above his door in the house.

“He drinks beer and is a womanizer,” Best said. “Any female. He tries to latch onto Janie, but she wants no part of him.”

And Janie apparently wants no part of any man, eventually revealing that she leads a celibate lifestyle. Turns out that the talking coming out of the bedroom really was just talk.

She’s also into doomsday prophecies (Helene asks her, “For or against?”) and a naturalist who informs household members about what types of flowers can be eaten.

All this happens mostly because George is wishy-washy.

“He needs to talk to the sons to make them understand they can’t live there,” Best said. “That conflict is funny. He’s a conciliator, he puts trouble under the water.”

George tries to deal with the situation by putting the house up for sale, but Helene loves the house. “He’s avoiding the issue,” Best said.

Helene, more realistic but becoming unraveled, is torn between her love for her children and her desire to see them gone. “She doesn’t want them home at 30 plus years of age,” Best said.

“It ends up that they leave, but they go through a bunch of mess,” she said. “The sons grow up, get their heads on straight.”

The cast’s Scott Goodwin is new to Le Petit but has acted onstage in North Carolina. Hornsby is a Le Petit veteran, appearing as the Jewish princess last year in “Horowitz and Mrs. Washington.” Pitre is a drama instructor in St. Charles Parish, while Cunningham appeared in Le Petit’s “Death by Chocolate.”

Best said some objectionable language was removed from Roman’s script, but not all of it.

“Alone Together” is running Thursday, Sept. 17, through Sunday, Sept. 27, at Le Petit (7829 Main St.), except for Monday, Sept. 21. All shows are at 7:30 p.m. except for the Sunday shows at 2 p.m. Call the theater at (985) 876-4278 for more information.

Scott Goodwyn and Robyn Hornsby star as a couple who, after their children leave for college, find themselves alone together for the first time in 30 years. Lawrence Roman’s comedy explores where relationships go after children fly the coop.