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The Long Christmas Ride Home at Actors Express
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Paula Vogel’s “The Long Christmas Ride Home� takes its audience for a ride, all right, with stops at church and Grandma’s house. But this is not the place to come to get your holiday spirit on. It’s more likely you’ll get your head twisted around by this bracingly unconventional tale of family dysfunction, time passages, Japanese art and, uh, puppet sex.
Those who know Vogel’s poetically provocative work (she won a 1998 Pulitzer Prize for “How I Learned to Drive,� which is about incest) won’t be surprised that this 90-minute one-act play is a) beautifully written and b) aimed at open-minded adults (and not — NOT — kids).
On a Christmas Eve in the past, Mom, Dad and three children are running the gauntlet of holiday traditions, from an unwanted sermon at church to unwanted presents from Grandma. The kids, in the back seat, are played by puppets, which are manipulated by adult actors. Dad is thinking about the woman he’s having an affair with, Mom is seethingly aware that Dad is having the affair, young Claire is thinking of the Christmas feast to come, teen Rebecca is thinking of the cute boys at school and her brother Stephen is also thinking of the cute boys at school, and wondering why.
Over the course of the evening, the family gets wound a little tighter, then a little tighter, until finally there is a point, a moment in time, when everything freezes, and shatters into shards. Those shards become the second half of the play, as the actors put down their kid-puppets and become the adults the young siblings grew up to be. (It’s much smoother than it sounds; Vogel has a way of writing in which almost everything seems inevitable.)
“Long Ride� is stuffed so full of dark comedy, melodrama, soliloquies, strange stage business and, uh, puppet sex, that in an unassured staging it could border on the ridiculous. Fortunately, this joint production by Actor’s Express and Synchonicity is simply beautiful, and beautifully simple — Rachel May’s direction is as crisp as an icy rope. The six actors are all uniformly up to the task: Jeff Feldman’s scarily intense dad, Kathleen Wattis as Mom, Stacy Melich as Rebecca, Kelly Marckioli as Claire and Adam Fristoe as Stephen, with Theroun Patterson as a sort of utility player.
Although set at Christmas, “Long Ride� doesn’t feel like a holiday play much of the time. Like the ending of “The Wizard of Oz,� though, it has brains, heart and courage. And particularly appeals to friends of Dorothy.
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