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The Long Christmas Ride Home, directed by Jessica Garrett at Single Carrot Theatre (SCT), is such a special theatre-going experience that I don’t want anyone else to know about it. Really, you can’t go wrong with a Paul Vogel play, but SCT’s production knocked it out of the park.
The Long Christmas Ride Home is divided into two scenes. The first tells the story of a dysfunctional family on their way to visit the grandparents for Christmas. The Man (Kaveh Haerian) and Woman (Genevieve de Mahy) function as mother and father and narrators for the first half of the play.
The children, Claire, Rebecca, and Stephen are puppets. Britt Olsen-Ecker, who plays Claire, Amy Parochetti Patrick, who plays Rebecca, and Elliot Rauh, who plays Stephen, are fully visible as they operate their respective puppets in the first half of the play. But this production is more than just a puppet show for grownups.
At the Christmas celebration, the youngest child, Claire, receives a gold charm bracelet from her father, who spotted the piece of jewelry while shopping for a woman with whom he is having an affair. Stephen begs to try on the bracelet, the children fight over it, and the bracelet finally breaks. The situation escalates and eventually the family leaves the house. On the car ride home, the wife tells her husband that he has ruined her Christmas, and he responds by slapping her arcoss the face – blackout. This single event traumatizes the children throughout their lives.
In the second half of the play, the actors abandon their puppets to play the adult versions of the siblings. Each sibling delivers an extensive monologue in which they end a dysfunctional relationship. And here is where the set design comes into play. Vogel calls for a minimalist set, but the Set Designer has to be creative because there needs to be enough playing areas for multiple different locations.
In the spirit of fitting form to content, Set Designer J. Buck Jabaily uses three windows (well, two windows and a door that leads to the Load of Fun Theatre adjacent to Single Carrot) to strengthen the bond between the siblings. Each sibling uses a different window to deliver a monologue ending their relationship with a lover. In that sense, the monologues are variations on a theme and serve to strengthen the bond between the siblings. Jabaily should be commended for his efficient use of the condensed Single Carrot Theatre stage.
There is one particularly disturbing moment in the play where we learn the circumstances in which Stephen contracts HIV. There is puppet-on-man sex, which transforms this production from puppet show to something-you-probably-should-not-take-small-children-to-see. For older audiences, the show was magical.
Part of its magic comes from the fact that this play experiments with an ancient form of Japanese puppetry called bunraku. There are other Asian influences in the play, including the characterization of Minister/Dancer (Aldo Pantoja), who delivers a Christmas sermon.
The Long Christmas Ride Home is a deeply personal play for Vogel, whose own brother Carl contracted AIDS and died from pneumonia. The play is considered book-ends to her more famous play, The Baltimore Waltz, which is about an elementary school teacher, Anna, who is dying from a made up disease called Acquired Toilet Disease. Anna and her brother Carl travel around Europe. It turns out that the whole play occurs in her imagination, while Carl is dying from an AIDS-induced illness in his Johns Hopkins Hospital bed. In this sense, The Long Christmas Ride Home tells the story of what happened before and after Carl passed away.
Much more than just a puppet show, this play is definitely worth seeing.
The Long Christmas Ride Home
by Paula Vogel
directed by Jessica Garrett
March 16 2011—April 17 2011
Tags: bunraku, Jessica Garrett, Paula Vogel, Single Carrot Theatre, The Baltimore Waltz, The Long Christmas Ride Home
Filed Under: Community Feature Sights
Eloquent review of a play that had not been on my radar but sounds not-to-be-missed.
April 4, 2011 11:53 amwell written review – sounds interesting
April 4, 2011 12:48 pm