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“But sad things aren’t the same as depressing things. I must be getting old—I like them,” says a character in Thornton Wilder’s “The Long Christmas Dinner,” a sometimes sad but ultimately life-affirming little gem of a play, presented by TUTA Theatre under the direction of co-artistic director Jacqueline Stone. It’s the second year in a row that TUTA has produced “Dinner,” which suggests it may become the troupe’s designated Christmas show—a welcome prospect. This year, like last, it’s being staged not at the company’s tiny home space in Ravenswood Manor, but rather in the more spacious Bramble Arts Loft in Andersonville, allowing a larger audience to relish its low-key pleasures.
After a rough start, the show finds its footing, drawing us into a domestic saga in which nothing extravagant or even particularly dramatic happens, allowing the ordinary to take on radiant meaning. Gradually, one realizes that this chronicle of one family’s experience over time of life, death, loss and renewal is actually every family’s story. It’s a tale as old as humanity, but one that must be relearned and re-experienced in every generation.
A foretaste of his better-known “Our Town,” written seven years later, Wilder’s one-act “Christmas Dinner” was published in 1931. Like the later work, “Dinner” is a gently philosophical ensemble piece that asks us to live more mindfully and appreciatively in the awareness that nothing lasts forever—not even sacred family rituals, like the elaborate Christmas dinner that the socially prominent Bayard family celebrates in its imposing home, located somewhere in the industrial Midwest. What gives this play its zing is that many decades’ worth of Christmas gatherings meld into one unbroken sequence. It’s the dramatic equivalent of time-lapse photography, creating a tragicomic sense of life’s recurrent rhythms and patterns.
The production begins badly, with a long stretch of musical noodling involving guitar and voice, obviously meant to pass time before the action begins. It’s followed by a drawn-out, equally vibe-killing announcement by director Stone and fellow co-artistic director Aileen Wen McGroddy. Finally the play starts—but what’s supposed to be a mid-nineteenth-century family feast is marred by anachronistic Motown music and some over-caffeinated acting, particularly by Bide Akande as adopted family member Cousin Brandon, who needs to take it down a notch.
It’s only after the first few minutes, when the production finally relaxes into the story, that the play’s structure reveals itself and its emotional charge begins to build. Two curtained booths flank the dining table that dominates designer Keith Parham’s simple, effective set: Life enters stage left and exits stage right. Between these periodic comings and goings, the Bayard clan grows up and grows old; children supplant parents; anecdotes and apercus are told and retold; spats between spouses and generations flare up and die down. The dialogue is echoing and compressed, as each new crop of Bayards regrets what was never shared—“I never told him or her how wonderful he or she was”—and what was foolishly spoken: “Perhaps an occasional war isn’t entirely bad,” opines one dad, who is destined to be left bereft by just such an occasional war. Fathers are emotionally uncommunicative and self-involved; mothers seek solace for their circumscribed lives; daughters are undervalued; sons are both favored and bullied into shape. Meanwhile, the house itself is aging, and the family is spreading out and losing its continuity. In the end, only a distantly related spinster cousin is left to mark the passing of a dynasty.
And that’s all. The plot features neither sharp conflict nor contrived ending. What there is is a universal story, mythical in its resonance but very American in its tone and manner, its fusion of narrow practicality and open sentimentality. The seven-person cast for the most part shines, including Huy Nguyen as the flawed but not unfeeling patriarch Charles; Charlie Irving as his high-energy sister Genevieve, a musically gifted woman who devotes herself to her mother, only to be left high and dry when she dies; and especially Joan Merlo, who plays the original Mother Bayard in the first scene and later the aged Cousin Ermengarde, the last resident of the Bayard manse. Merlo’s final moments on stage are acting of a high order, as she conveys purely with expression and gesture an entire life of humble, quiet acceptance.
Not explicitly religious but deeply spiritual, “The Long Christmas Dinner,” about one family’s seasonal tradition, itself has the makings of a fine holiday-time tradition for local theatergoers. It offers not treacly, feel-good cliches, but rather home truths, tinged with a melancholic beauty—and also a healthy appreciation for the courage and faith required to forge ahead, even though we know how the story must end.
Buddhism teaches that what causes suffering is the misperception that the world is a fixed thing to be clung to, rather than a continual process of change and becoming. As far as I know, Thornton Wilder wasn’t a Buddhist, but his existential humanism led him in a similar direction. This show brings that lesson home, with a lovely delicacy of touch.
TUTA Theatre’s “The Long Christmas Dinner” runs through December 28 at Bramble Arts Loft, 5545 North Clark. Tickets start at $20 plus fees, with patrons encouraged to pay more if they are inclined to do so. To purchase tickets, visit tutatheatre.org.
