by Paula Vogel
directed by Oskar Eustis
Trinity Repertory Company
201 Washington St. Providence RI / (401 ) 351- 4242
closed June 29thIRNE NOMINATIONS
Best New Play
Best Director
Best Actress - Anne Scuria
The Trinity Repertory Company under Oskar Eustis received national kudos last year for participating in the development of Tony Kuschner's "Homebody - Kabul"--which got the Best New Play IRNE as well. Joining forces with Pulitzer Prize winning Brown University playwrighting professor Paula Vogel was a logical next step. Her "The Long Christmas Ride Home" is in many ways a more ambitious and less finished product than last season's more cerebral effort. It is also a rather unique experiment in combining contemporary theatrical puppetry with current playwrighting trends.
Vogel starts, however, from a more established source; the one acts of Thorton Wilder, specifically "The Long Christmas Dinner" and "The Happy Journey from Trenton to Camden", pieces rarely done these days even in high school. As in several of her earlier works, she brings in relevant autobiographical situations, whose subtext is not always clear, particularly in the second half of the piece. This production was performed without intermission, which may have been a strategic error, since the work is almost equally divided between past and current actions and the transition is not entirely effective. A blackout, with a restart at just the same moment after the interval would have avoided an onstage costume change and some extra avista scene shifting--plus allowing the audience and the cast a breather.
The use of puppetry and Japanese stagecraft throughout the piece could easily have become affected, but Berklee musician Sumie Kaneko's string and percussion work, particularly when functioning as puppet voices in the second half lifts the whole show. Basil Twist's figures of the three children in the hands of the cast and the professional puppeteers take on life in a way young actors could not achieve. The work of the three Trinity company members, Angela Brazil as Claire, Stephen Thorne as Stephen, and Rachael Warren as Rebecca is masterful considering their lack of experience with direct-contact puppetry. The secret, if any, lies in the actors playing the grownup characters being assigned the primary task of keeping the heads of figures representing their younger selves focused on the action, while the experienced operators, Joshua Boggioni,Joanna Cole, Virginia Eckert, Andy Gaukel, Maya Parra, and Paul Ricciardi took care of the details of bodily movements. For the first half, all nine were dressed in the traditional black garments of the kuroko(stage hand). The puppeteers were hooded, the actors visible and attentive. No program bios were available for the puppeteers, but most of them appear to be associated with Twist's work in New York and ongoing puppetry production at the HERE Art Center.
The script contains Japanese motifs and references; the most obvious coming from a visiting Unitarian minister at the seasonal service played by Sean Martin Hingston, who invokes "the floating world" as a metaphor for his holiday sermon and slide show. But the plot device in the second half, which involves Stephen's return on St. Stephen's Day (Jan.26th) after his death from AIDS, has resonances derived from traditional Japanese ghost stories. Unfortunately the scenes of the three siblings grown up lives seem less well-developed and almost too pat--a mixture of pop psychology and soap opera, not up to Vogel's best work. The puppetry used in them is cruder and somewhat perfunctory. Shadow puppets might have been a better choice for these symbols of failed relationships than the crude rod puppets used, and would have afforded the possibility of change of scale. The life-sized Biker/Death figure should have been more plainly the latter. Backdrop shadows would have been a possible addition to Loy Arcenas' simple setting with abstract projected backdrops, especially if these echoed the minister's slide show.
Hingston, seen on Broadway in "Contact" has a Butoh inspired dance piece which while technically impressive needed more narrative structure. Adding a Noh mask might have been achieved some sort of climax. Hingston also displayed his acting range in the first half by playing both grandparents, mostly Grandpa in its finale. This scene was also notable for live sound effects produced Foley style by one of the puppeteers. All in all, unlike some recent attempts to mix cultural motifs, this show largely succeeded, due to Eustis' precise direction and the intermediary nature of the puppetry.
Almost unnoticed in all the dramatic goings on was the solid work of Trinity veterans, Timothy Crowe and Anne Scurria as the Man and the Woman, Father and Mother to this unhappy brood. During the first half they supplied almost all of the narration and dialogue and probably should have been at least a distant presence during the second. In effect they served as both actors in the piece and ubiquitous narrators, allowing Vogel to use dialogue, description, and interior monologue as needed. Her work has always had a novelistic bent, and this piece was no exception.
Whether or not "The Long Christmas Ride Home" can go on to further development and production depends on finding the kind of ideal circumstances under which the show was done at Trinity. Playwrights and producers hoping to use these techniques, particularly direct-contact puppetry, with or without Japanese cultural overtones, will do well to consider the problem of integrating such elements into a coherent show. Fortunately, due to educational programs such as the one at UConn, or the efforts at the O'Neill every June, there is a cadre of puppet performers capable of rising to this challenge. There are highly narrative scripts which might be economically revived using such techniques, especially for smaller venues.