‘Sordid Lives’ loves its uncouth characters

The characters in Del Shore’s “Sordid Lives” are unapologetically ribald, the kind of people you might derogatorily refer to as “white trash.” But the show, opening in the Civic’s studio theater this weekend, always makes sure that you’re laughing with the characters, not at them.

The show’s comedy doesn’t come from a place of condescension: Shore’s characters know who they are, and they’re proud of it.

“We’ve worked really hard not to make them cartoons,” said the show’s director, Lance Babbitt. “These characters are what they are, and they kind of embrace who they are, which makes the humor much funnier.”

“Sordid Lives” is set in Shore’s hometown of Winters, Texas, which, as the play opens, is grieving the death of a beloved, God-fearing matriarch named Peggy Ingram.

But as details of the tragic situation come to light, it turns out that Peggy wasn’t as virtuous as previously thought: The cause of her demise is determined to be a blow to the head, which she sustained after tripping over her married lover’s wooden legs during a motel room tryst.

The fallout from Peggy’s death defines the rest of the play, and Shore unloads a trailer park’s worth of colorful characters, all with connections to the dead women: Peggy’s warring daughters, Latrelle (Phedre Burney-Peters) and LaVonda (Jamie Sciarrio); her son Earl (Gary Pierce), who spends most of the show in drag; her closeted gay nephew Ty (John Michael Collins); her clandestine boyfriend G.W. (Anthony Joseph Mazzie); and his harried wife, Noleta (Whitney Huskey).

“If you grew up in a small town, or even a small neighborhood, you will recognize these people,” Babbitt said. “Everybody has that one crazy aunt that maybe drinks too much at Thanksgiving. They’re broadly drawn, but at their core, they’re very real people in a strange situation.”

Much of “Sordid Lives” was inspired by Shore’s experiences growing up gay in a mostly conservative town. Babbitt says he’s actually visited the town of Winters (population: 2,500), and that helped inform certain aspects of his production.

“I realized I could push boundaries in certain ways,” Babbitt said. “I mean, there are women in this town who you can tell live by the motto, ‘the higher the hair, the closer to God.’ If anything, it freed me to go further than I thought I could go. … They’re proud people, and they own what they own.”

But it’s not just enough to rely on retro hairdos, cheap makeup and unflattering costumes for a few cheap laughs. Babbitt says he and his cast made sure to keep the characters grounded in reality and to take them seriously as people.

“At the end of the day, the word we keep coming back to is ‘redemption,’ ” Babbitt said. “(The characters) all have sordid pasts. They all, in one way or another, find redemption in what has happened and how they move forward. The situations are hysterically funny and crazy and loud, but (the actors) have to be honest with where they’re going.”