'See Rock City' opens at Oak Street Playhouse

The stories about newlyweds during World War II are legion: The young soldier marries his best girl, then is whisked away to the South Pacific or the German front.

Except it didn't always work out like that.

"See Rock City," opening Friday, April 29, at Oak Street Playhouse for six shows through next weekend, is a sweet and tender story of newlyweds during World War II.

The story finds young newlywed Raleigh kept from military service by a medical condition while his wife, May, supports the two as a high school principal. As the war progresses, he hears the whispers of cowardice from the townspeople in rural Kentucky, endures criticism from his mother and receives rejection letters for his writing submissions.

For him, it is a test of the human spirit.

"The characters are really honest - very real," says director Brenda Schwab. "That's why I love it."

The relationships between the four characters in the show, Raleigh, May, and their two mothers, as well as how they, in small ways, are dealing with the war are what embodies the play, she says.

The comedy in the show, Schwab says, comes through the foibles of the individual characters, whose personalities are timeless. She says "See Rock City" playwright Arlene Hutton, for instance, compared the character of Raleigh to that of Andy Griffith in the well-loved "Andy Griffith Show" of the 1960s. The director herself see similarities in the character to the earnest, naive roles a young Jimmy Stewart played.

And the two mothers, she says, are both "good, Christian women, but different - from different walks of life. And that's where the humor lies.

"It's a very sweet, tender story that has a lot of real humor," Schwab says.

Oak Street Playhouse is located in First-Centenary United Methodist Church.