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It’s always Christmas at the Bayard house, located somewhere across the Mississippi. “Every last twig is wrapped around with ice,” exclaims Lucia (Alexis Primus), peering out the window. At dinner, the place settings never change, though sometimes the people do, as 90 years of Bayards march through time and Christmastide. Newlyweds Roderick (Matt Miles) and Lucia host Mother Bayard (Joan Merlo), who can remember “when there were Indians on this very land.” Son Charles (Huy Nguyen) goes ice-skating and gets married to Leonora (Seoyoung Park). In 75 minutes, we see births, deaths, war, industrialization, and Anthropocene-era environmental disasters.
The Long Christmas Dinner
Through 12/29: Fri–Sat 7:30 PM, Sun 3 PM; also Thu 12/19, Mon 12/23, and Thu 12/26 7:30 PM; Bramble Arts Loft, 5545 N. Clark, tutatheatre.org, pay what you can (suggested $20-$60)
The meal is endless, a menu incessantly eaten from plates that never register a mark—another toast, a sea shanty sung boisterously so its gruesome text is never quite heard. Changes are understated—a baby born, a basket carried into the room, a death as easy as walking out the door—rendering landmark events on the scale of an extra glass of wine tipped back, or a jelly left behind in the kitchen.
In TUTA Theatre’s production of Thornton Wilder’s The Long Christmas Dinner (written by the author of Our Town when he was teaching at the University of Chicago), directed by Jacqueline Stone, characters seem to recur as cast members are reincarnated as their own descendants. In the brevity of such episodes, it can seem difficult to invest in the details, yet impossible not to confront, within the mundanity of each occurrence and recurrence, the same tragic smallness of loss and love within our own lives. “We let him go so casually,” weeps Leonora. “Only time, only the passing of time,” says Lucia. “Don’t grieve.”
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