‘Good morning Luna Del Mar!” Mansfield Playhouse powers up “Radio TBS” comedy on Friday

“Therefore I shall be startin’ a petition crusade in which I will be askin’ each of our park residents to sign. After I have collected the signatures and Imogene still fails to see the light, I think we just need to do what my dear, late husband used to suggest in times such as these, and have us a good, old-fashioned, Old Testament stoning!” — Mary Eunice Wheaton, “Radio TBS”

MANSFIELD — Amy Sharp has a master’s degree in social work and has a job trying to help families adopt children.

The Mansfield resident is not nearly so nice in her first-ever role at the Mansfield Playhouse in “Radio TBS,” a new all-female comedy that opens Friday night.

Set in a Florida trailer park in a show penned by playwright Mark Landon Smith in 1998, the 38-year-old Sharp portrays Mary Eunice Wheaton, the park’s holier-than-thou matriarch whose sole mission is to rid the double-wide community of resident Imogene Hurst (Mary Kettering).

How does she juxtapose her life of a caring social worker with her role as a judgmental religious zealot? An uncaring neighbor who is circulating a petition to get rid of a woman whose biggest fault appears to be she teaches belly-dancing lessons?

“I joked during our first audition that I’m the mom of a 2-year-old,” Sharp said with a laugh. “So all the frustration and yelling that Mary Eunice does is just all the frustration that I have pent up from having a 2-year-old.”

Radio TBS cast

Suzanne Allen — Vesta Poteet

Jennifer Briner — Dixie Mandrell

Mary Ann Calhoun — Missy Goode

Amy Sharp — Mary Eunice Wheaton

Johnna Gustafson — Harlene Akers

Sarah Mumford — Alveeta McClay

Heidi Ankrum — Pauline Felts

Liana Ashbrook — Mayola Felts

Mary Schalmo — Madge Huskey

Mary Kettering — Imogene Hurst.

Sharp said she is happy to be back on stage for the first time in 11 years.

“I was really missing the theater and the stars finally aligned that there was a show that I was available for and felt that I had a realistic shot of getting. So it’s like, all right, here we go,” she said.

Her last theatrical effort came in Newark.

“I stopped doing shows when I started my master’s program. I was working full-time, full-time student internship, so I was very busy.

“And then I finished that and I got married. So there was wedding planning. I moved, I moved again. There’s just always something. And whenever I did have a break, it just seemed like nothing was working out.

“There were either no shows that I was interested in or I had a conflict with the performance date and I couldn’t do it. This one, it just kind of all came together and it seemed like a really fun show,” she said.

Sharp said she decided to audition at the last minute and didn’t have a chance to read the whole script.

“I just Googled it and they had 18 pages online and that included (her) character’s opening monologue and it’s just so mean and judgmental. I thought she just sounds like fun,” she said.

“I was really pleasantly surprised when I got the part,” Sharp said.

She is a part of a 10-woman ensemble cast set in the The Luna Del Mar Manufactured Home Oasis and Monkey Empire somewhere in Florida.

The show gets its title (Radio Trailer Park Broadcasting Scandals) from an extremely low-powered daily radio show by residents Vesta Poteet (Suzanne Allen) and Dixie Mandrell (Jennifer Briner).

The two women narrate all the comings and goings and activities of the amazingly busy trailer park.

Doug Wertz, the artistic director at the Playhouse, said there are many funny things happening among the mobile-home park denizens.

“There’s a lot going on in this show. Obviously, you find some of the strange things that go on cause of the hypocrisies that happen, the cattiness of some of these ladies. The plotting and the conniving, backstabbing, gossip, things like that,” Wertz said.

“Just some of the comments and the goings on, what gets reported about what’s happening in the park itself. There was a lot of funny stuff in this show, a lot of funny stuff,” he said.

Radio TBS show information

“Radio TBS” will be performed at 8 p.m. on March 10, 11, 17 and 18; and 2:30 p.m. on March 19.

For more information or to buy tickets, visit www.mansfieldplayhouse.com or call 419-522-2883. The box office is open Wednesday through Friday from 1 to 6 p.m. and one hour before performancers.

Allen, a Playhouse veteran, said she jumped at the chance to be in an all-female cast. She was most recently in the cast of the Second Stage comedy “Exit Laughing” at the Playhouse in November.

“I am getting a chance to work with some new people and work with some folks I’ve already worked with,” the retired school teacher said.

“It’s a lot of kind of monologuey kinds of things. You do a little vignette here and a little vignette here. So it’s it’s real different from shows where you tell a whole story consistently with a whole group of people,” she said.

“It’s kind of everybody’s telling their own little tale, but it all goes together,” Allen said.

Heidi Ankrum portrays trailer park resident Pauline Felts, the mother of a (literally) growing young woman whom she would like to see enter the community’s Miss Manatee Pageant.

Ankrum, who has also directed three shows at the Playhouse, makes no apologies for the fact her character wants her daughter to win a sea cow title.

“I did this play was because it seemed funny. It was the one script that I really hadn’t (read closely).

“I’m on the (theater’s) play-reading (committee), so I read all of the plays and I was like ‘oh, maybe.’  But then this one seemed like a lot more fun and I just get to be kind of silly … too silly,” she said.

Sarah Mumford, as Alveeta McClay, runs the trailer park’s charm school and is tasked with preparing Felts’ daughter for the pageant. Given the size of her always-eating protégé, it’s not a task McClay takes lightly.

But Mayola Felts (Liana Ashbrook) has the one key characteristic needed for the title. She’s not pregnant.

“She is very serious about grooming interested persons to win beauty pageants. She has had some mild success with one person who has been named Miss Fireman’s Hotdog Rodeo & Jamboree,” Mumford said.

“Someone’s won that and someone placed in the top five at the Miss Non-Lethal Asbestos Competition. So it’s a pretty big deal,” the Lexington resident said with a laugh.

Mumford, who most recently appeared on stage in “Always A Bridesmaid” a year ago, often works backstage at Playhouse shows. The “Radio TBS” script attracted her.

“I thought it all seemed really fun. Everybody has a funny little story and has funny lines, funny little jokes. I hope everybody catches them all because, you know, it’s just these ladies in the course of their days,” said Mumford, who works in research compliance for the University of Illinois Ubana-Champaign.

“Luckily I can work from home, which is what has allowed me to move back to Mansfield,” she said.