A long, strange
'Ride' from crisis to awakening
November 17, 2005 from the Chicago Sun-Times
RECOMMENDED
BY HEDY WEISS Theater Critic
On one level, Paula Vogel's play "The Long Christmas Ride Home" is
yet another dysfunctional family holiday tale, set in a world reminiscent of
John Updike's suburban America, circa 1970. But what sets this blackly comic
and often poetic 80-minute work apart is the way Vogel has infused her story
with a Japanese subtext -- one that not only carries over to certain crucial
elements of the play's performance and design, but also suggests how the ritualistic
aspects of an Eastern culture can serve as a fascinating overlay for our own
Western conduct of life.
There are things to take issue with in Vogel's play, a memoir of childhood attached to an extended epilogue, all of it with a strong hint of the quasi-autobiographical. But director Jason Loewith's production of the work at Evanston's Next Theatre is impeccable -- from its casting, to its visual and aural appeal, to, above all, the contributions of master puppet designer Michael Montenegro, who has created some of the more heartbreakingly tender (as well as some of the most decidedly X-rated) puppet characters you may ever encounter. And Vogel's writing, especially in its first half, lurches impressively from the lyrical to the fearsomely slicing.
Wheels falling off
The play begins as a money-strapped middle-class family of five heads to the grandparents' house in an old Rambler. It's a hellish ride, and we are allowed to listen in on the interior monologues of the embattled parents in an unhappy intermarriage. The Jewish father (played by Troy West, an actor with a gift for turning the most brittle sarcasm and barely suppressed rage into a kind of modern opera) wants to be free of his family and fantasizes about the women with whom he is having an affair. His Christian wife (the ever-intriguing Wendy Robie) is a model of passivity who knows exactly what is going on but more often than not bites her lip.
In the back seat are the already damaged kids -- embodied by Montenegro's puppets, who have such real and revealing faces that they assume instant life. Their existence is further enhanced by the subtle and evocative manipulations of the splendid actors who will later play them as adults, including Julia Neary (as Rebecca, the oldest); Timothy Hendrickson as Stephen (the only boy, already effeminate), and Jennifer Avery (as Claire, the youngest).
Japanese influences
The family attends a Unitarian service where a quirky minister (Cameron Jappe), just back from Japan, goes on and on about his discoveries there -- particularly his love for the artists who evoked a "floating world" of beauty and sexual pleasure. Each child connects to this sermon in a particular way. But for Stephen, whose Christmas Day is to be particularly traumatic, this Japanese world will captivate him forever.
This also is the key to Vogel's use of Noh-style and shadow puppets in her story. And it is the inspiration for Matthew J. York's lovely Japanese screen set (with projections of Hiroshige's famous snowy Mt. Fuji landscapes), the fiercely sensual East-West choreography of Christina Ernst and the East-West sound of Scotty Iseri's score (played live).
The play's "epilogue" -- in which we see how the three children turned out years later (all bearing predictable psychological scars) -- seems laced with a bit too much dime store psychology, though it is very likely drawn from Vogel's own experience. In any case, the play's most powerful emotional moments arrive like the startling claps of woodblocks -- the same sound that signals the start of Japanese plays.