David Adkins as the mature Truman; photo by Emma K. Rothenberg-Ware

     Truman is played by David Adkins who brings the man a delicate elegance that cannot entirely avoid his Arkansas rustication as he narrates his own story from a discreet distance. His refined manners are the result of education and life in sophisticated New York where he has put behind him all the waste of a childhood in the battered and grim country life of an abandoned bumpkin. He maintains a cold attitude about his childhood but he is clearly the core of Holly Golightly  in the flesh, denying recalling things with a spatter of gold dust where there was only dust, with a gilded spirit where there was actually no gold at all, but only a worthless cameo treasured for its promise of great future wealth.

     Adkins brings all of this to his portrayal, appearing as an immovable narrator of realities while actually a passionate re-writer of personal history. He flees, when it is necessary, from the truth of incidents in his formative years. He indulges in the sweetness of his cousin's devotion. Adkins makes this dichotomy seem normal and perhaps it is. His Truman is not a self-indulgent man, though he does dwell on the most simple things, Sook's engagement with her dog, for example, more often than on other things, like his own education and his relationships with other kids, even when they're important to the story. The actor never dwells on what is essential, only on what is important to Buddy, his younger self.

     Buddy is played by Tim Jones who cannot be seven or sound seven. His young Truman is a young man trapped in a world of aging children like himself, personified by Miss Sook. He moves, sounds and looks like the man Truman was when he wrote the holiday stories; he was 32 in 1956 (two years before Breakfast at Tiffany's). Photos of the man taken ten years earlier appear to be a boy of 15. This agelessness of the man works in Jones' advantage as the boy. In this play he feels older than seven, older than a second grader. As Jones moves through the play the character's actual age becomes less important; he is a young Truman and that's all that matters.

     One reason for that is Jones himself. He is an able actor interpreting a role written for a young attractive man to play. The reality of that is what makes the play believable. His relationship with his older cousin is what is important for the story really belongs to her. In the one photograph I've seen of her with Buddy she is clearly a woman of sixty or more years and he s about five years old. There is a strange resemblance between them, though, and each displays a confidence that normally belongs to safely well-established people; except for one moment in the first act Jones puts that across beautifully and the scene of insecurity brings him to that unique world of intellectually childish confusion with an equal self-assurance.