The Long Christmas Ride Home

[April 23rd, 2008]

As Sammy Hagar is always eager to remind us, there’s a time and place for everything. Late April sure doesn’t feel like the proper time for a play about a Christmas ride—didn’t we gorge ourselves sick on Yuletide drama in December?—but trust me, this is one show you wouldn’t want to see during the holidays.

There’s very little Christmas spirit in Paula Vogel’s 2003 tragicomedy, which begins with an ill-fated family trip to Grandmother’s house and follows the lingering effects of one awful night through the children’s adult lives. Things look ugly from the beginning, as the unnamed mother and father (Heather Rose Walters and Darius Pierce) narrate the trip, giving voice both to their private concerns of infidelity and insecurity and to their puppet children (more on that later). As the play progresses the situation gets uglier, building to a frightening climax of violence leading to a sudden transition as we see the children, now grown, struggling with adultery in their own lives. It’s an eerie play, filled with ghosts and shadow, and it’s perfect for a gloomy spring.

But back to the puppet children. Vogel devises a neat solution to the dramaturgical dilemma of staging a play with child and adult versions of the same characters. Here the children are portrayed with Bunraku puppets, manipulated by the actors who go on to play the characters as adults. Although the effect is strange—the puppets, made to order by Jason Miranda and Nancy Aldrich of Tears of Joy Theatre, bear an uncanny resemblance to the puppeteers—it circumvents the problems of working with children or having adults play children.

The puppets are just the beginning. Vertigo’s production, directed by Kristan Seemel, is steeped in Japanese theatrical tradition, from the pagoda-themed set to the kimono-ish costumes and Noh-influnced choreography. It’s lovely, and makes a striking contrast to the play’s decidedly Western themes of infidelity and domestic violence.

Seemel’s artistic vision—not to mention Vogel’s—is remarkably complete, and this production is more cohesive than any we’ve seen from Vertigo since 2006. Pierce makes excellent use of his mellifluous and versatile voice and Gary Norman (Stephen) is as good as we have come to expect him to be, but Walters gives her finest performance to date as the long-suffering, cuckolded mother. It’s a touching, at times harrowing show. But holiday cheer? Not so much.