Stephanie Klein-Davis | The Roanoke Times

John Isner as Jefferson Davis (as Elvis)

Photo gallery

• From Confederate prez to "king"

Audio

Listen the opening song from "Jeff!"

Plays coming up

"Jeff!"

• at Blue Ridge Dinner Theatre at Ferrum College, runs though June 24.

"Jonah and the Great Big Fish"

• runs June 27 through July 1.

• (540) 365-4335; www.blueridgedinnertheatre.com

With live theater audiences declining nationally, some theaters are reverting to the tried and true.

Blue Ridge Dinner Theatre, on the other hand, is aiming for left field.

Rex Stephenson, longtime artistic director of the venerable independent theater at Ferrum College, is serving up two of his own creations to audiences this summer. Both are musicals. In one of them, Jefferson Davis, president of the Confederacy, comes back to life as Elvis Presley. The other is a modern-day retelling, with plenty of snappy one-liners, of the biblical story of Jonah and the whale.

Neither "Jeff!" nor "Jonah and the Great Big Fish" are standard dinner theater fare. Both reflect Stephenson's quirky sense of humor and underlying seriousness of purpose, and both are spiced up by a generous helping of original songs.

It's risky -- but Blue Ridge Dinner Theatre fans are used to it. Stephenson, author of 35 plays, has produced many of them at the dinner theater in his 27-year tenure. Stephenson's plays have also been produced around the United States and in China, England, Russia, Australia and New Zealand.

The theater's summer season also offers more traditional selections, such as "the Odd Couple," which concluded its run last week, and "Kids Say the Darndest Things," which opens in July.

Also in July, the theater will present "Smoke on the Mountain," an evening of vintage hymns and funny stories, written by Alan Bailey and Constance Ray.

'A mistaken man'

Stephenson once told a reporter: "I think it's easier to see the present by looking at some of the things out of the past." "Jeff!" and "Jonah" combine past and present in a manner sometimes cornball and sometimes moving, but seldom dull.

"Jeff!" is the story of the perhaps misunderstood president of the Confederacy, who was somehow never venerated on the level of the South's other Civil War heroes, such as Thomas Jonathan "Stonewall" Jackson and Robert E. Lee.

"Jeff!" mines territory that Stephenson, a native of the Midwest, has explored before -- the Civil War and the independent spirit of the South. Stephenson wrote a play in the early 1990s about Abraham Lincoln's assassination, and this is his second version of "Jeff!," which was first performed at the dinner theater in 1992 under a different name.

Stephenson was never satisfied with the first version, however, and this winter, "I ripped that thing apart and put it back together." The new version takes fewer shortcuts and does a better job of portraying the man, he said.

So why does Davis come back to life as Elvis?

Stephenson said he just wants to be loved. "He says, 'People don't care about me anymore, but they sure care about Elvis.' " Throughout the play, Davis struggles to explain his life and actions while others accuse of him of incompetence and coldness, among other sins.

John Isner, a director and actor at a children's theater in Little Rock, Ark., plays Davis. He also played Davis in the first version of "Jeff!," when he was still a student at Ferrum College.

"It's been a learning experience," Isner said of portraying the Southern president. "What I come away with is, he was a mistaken man."

"He wasn't a warm, outgoing type of character," said Mike Trochim, a Ferrum College history professor who plays Northern Secretary of War Edwin Stanton in the play. "Jefferson Davis had a lot of moral courage. But it was exercised in the wrong time and the wrong place."

Following the war, Davis was imprisoned on a charge of treason. The charge was eventually dropped, and Davis released, but as Stephenson's play makes clear, his later life was never easy. Davis died in 1889. His citizenship was not restored until 1978.

Jonah and 'a torch song'

Rehearsals for "Jonah" are just getting under way. Stephenson's new play is an account of the prophet Jonah -- and, of course, the whale that swallowed him whole.

Jonah, a self-described "minor prophet," is ordered by God to convert sinners in Ninevah. In Stephenson's version, he embarks for a vacation in Spain instead. Stephenson combines the well-known story of the whale with Caribbean cruise liners, television reporters, Euro Disney and a hot dog stand. (For those who don't see the Bible as a source for humor, it should be noted that the story ends with a moral, as Jonah comes to understand his duty to God and the need to forgive his fellow man.)

"Jonah" includes a handful of new songs by 25-year-old Franklin County schoolteacher Emily Rose Tucker, who has been collaborating with Stephenson for several seasons. The music runs the gamut from jazz, gospel and blues to surfing songs. There is also "a torch song," said Tucker. She also contributed a song to "Jeff!," and plays the role of Mrs. Clay in the play.

Stephenson said he needs to push the envelope now and then, even if it could mean losing money. The theater, though housed at Ferrum College, gets no financial support from the college and must balance its own budget and pay its own bills, Stephenson said.

Still, "If I had to do four Neil Simons -- I'm like Ricky Nelson," he said. "I'd rather drive a truck."