Review: Ten Thousand Things’ ‘Spitfire Grill’ crackles in minimalist staging

Could a tomboy jailbird seeking comfort and a new start of her own really be the blessing and the balm that the godforsaken Wisconsin town known as Gilead needs?

Perchance “Percy” Talbott (Katherine Fried) doesn’t set out to be a catalyst in “The Spitfire Grill,” the James Valcq-Fred Alley musical and a Ten Thousand Things Theater production. The shy, wounded ex-con is seeking a quiet place to renew her spirit after five years in the penitentiary. She chooses Gilead because of a beautiful bucolic photo she saw in a travel book.

Of course, once she’s dropped off in town, she finds something entirely different. The jaded townspeople live in a state of suspended animation that’s best exemplified by the fact that Hannah Ferguson (Michelle Barber), the lady with secrets who hires Percy at her greasy spoon, has been trying to sell it for 10 years.

Gilead is a place that people are always leaving, Percy’s parole officer Joe Sutter (Dominic Schiro) tells her. He, too, plans to scoot as soon as he can.

But through an idea hatched by Percy and Hannah’s niece-in-law Shelby (Katie Bradley) to get buyers interested in the eatery, the townspeople finally see themselves with new eyes.

“Spitfire” is based on Lee David Zlotoff’s 1996 film headlined by Marcia Gay Harden and Ellen Burstyn. For the stage version, locales and names have been changed and some characters have been eliminated. Things get even more elemental in this production imaginatively co-directed by Marcela Lorca and Michelle O’Neill in minimalist style.

Sticks are artfully manipulated to represent jail bars, window frames and a bus. Kitchen utensils accent the rhythms in Peter Vitale’s dramatic musical backing. And, most of all, “Spitfire” boasts terrific performances.

A stellar singer skilled at injecting character into her song, Fried gives Percy both rough edges and wistful longing. Her “Out of the Frying Pan” carries Percy’s palpable hunger. And all her beautiful notes on “A Ring Around the Moon” and “Shine” are colored by hope and hurt.

The haunting duality of Fried’s lead performance is reason enough to see this show but she also is surrounded by an able ensemble. Hannah is a woman who has built her life on noble, “Never Heal” stories and Barber invests her with a truculence that’s not just about the pain she publicly carries, but also about protecting those tales. Hannah does find release and Barber lets us feel it in “Way Back Home.”

Bradley is showing new colors of her skillset as Shelby, the suppressed wife of Hannah’s realtor nephew Caleb (Tom Reed), a former quarry foreman. Bradley delivers “Wild Bird,” Shelby’s song for her friend, Percy, with soothing heart.

Walking with head held high like a grebe in ritual mating display, George Keller finds comic gold as busybody postmistress Effy Krayneck. For their part, Reed and Schiro also perform commendably in roles that could have simply been rote.

“Spitfire” revisits an old trope of the outsider coming in and shaking things up, helping people to see into themselves and calling to their better, more creative angels. It’s a show about the things that imprison us, things that we may not even recognize as such. And it takes someone from a literal prison to help people trapped in their own suspended prisons become free again.

That’s an evergreen message that crackles to beautiful life in this must-see production of “Spitfire Grill.”

When: 7:30 p.m. Thu. & Fri., 4 p.m. Sat. & Sun. Ends June 9.

Where: Hennepin Avenue United Methodist Church, 511 Groveland Av., Mpls. Thru May 16. See website for additional times and venues.

Tickets: $35 or pay-as-you-are. 612-203-9502, tenthousandthings.org.