Review: The Long Christmas Ride Home (Strawdog Theatre)

By Chicagotheaterbeat @chitheaterbeat

  
  
The Long Christmas Ride Home

Written by Paula Vogel
Strawdog Theatre, 3829 N. Broadway (map)
thru Dec 12  | tix: $28  | more info
  
Check for half-price tickets  
  

  

  

Ghosts of Christmas collide in absorbing examination of life’s pivotal moments

  

  

Strawdog Theatre Company presents

  

The Long Christmas Ride Home

Review by Clint May 

On an extremely cold East Coast Christmas Eve, the air is about to crystallize and freeze a singular event in a family’s life. Such is the moment that Paula Vogel recreates in The Long Christmas Ride Home, an eclectic look at the influences in our lives that unconsciously shape our futures. Her cathartic exhumation is a nervy memento mori that rebuffs holiday cheeriness in favor of a deeply humanist exploration of the ties that bind.

An interfaith marriage of a Jewish father (Ed Dzialo) and Catholic mother (Loretta Rezos) is falling apart. Dad is a barely disguised philanderer who cannot stop dreaming of his latest conquest, while mom weighs having another child or an affair. On this night—somewhere in the early 1970s—their Universalist Unitarian mass is overseen by a guest minister (John Taflan). Just back from Japan, he regales the congregation with spiritual parallels between East and West, particularly the Ukiyo or ‘floating worlds.’ Afterwards, it’s off to grandparent’s house they go for a disastrous encounter that brings long-buried tensions to a head and a hasty exit into a snowstorm. The three children will be trapped on that snow covered road, unable to back away from the various escarpments that await them in adulthood.

Flash forward to three scenes set at various points in the following years. Each of the children is outside a door, desperately trying to gain entry. What keeps the doors shut varies in the details but remains constant in the generalities. They are reenacting the long ago trauma of their youth. Not just that single night but the observation of a hyper dysfunctional marriage. Rebecca has a surprise for an unsympathetic boyfriend. Claire is in law school and dallying with a lesbian love affair and cannot find the fidelity she seeks. Stephen (Sam Hubbard) is rejected by his lover on account of his age and makes a rash decision that dooms his future.

Like the rambler itself that features so prominently in the family’s history, Ride is packed to the brim with ideas that threaten to overwhelm its 85 minute length. Vogel includes Brechtian flourishes, an homage to Thornton Wilder, and autobiographical details (like Claire, she also cared for a brother dying of AIDS). Bunraku-style puppetry (designed by Stephanie Diaz) sketches out the children, shadow puppets an affair, and a danse macabre’s stolen breath. Structurally, Ride is a Western-style tale of dysfunction told with the Mugen Noh style from Japan. Noh theater typically invokes ghosts and Ride is no different, as the sisters are each visited at a critical moment on the one night that Stephen is allowed to walk the earth ("his" feast day, Dec 26). Tellingly, we are not told what happened to the parents.

Josh Sobel directs his cast with extreme grace in a production with such audacious goals and multiple styles. Dzialo and Rezos are completely compelling as the parents, drifting into stylized narration and naturalistic interactions effortlessly. They create a realistic couple that still has inside jokes even as their marriage is falling apart. Gitenstein and Johnson have a lot of work to do creating flawed, empathetic characters in one scene each and they generate a remarkable amount of depth in a short amount of time. It’s ultimately Hubbard who inhabits Ride’s heart. There’s a Kusher-esque soliloquy that puts a fine point on the thematic overtones and metaphors of Ride that would have been syrupy if not for Hubbard’s heartfelt invocation.

Dickens immortally reminded us of our mortality in a ghost story when he said that Christmas is the time when we see all people as fellow passengers to the grave. The Long Christmas Ride Home similarly makes us aware of the multiple journeys with one destination, the importance of the landmarks, of moving on, of pulling back from the precipice, and of the people with whom we find ourselves huddled against the cold.

  

Rating: ★★★½

  

  

Long Christmas Ride Home continues through December 12th at Strawdog Theatre, 3829 N. Broadway (map), with performances Thursdays-Saturdays at 8pm, Sundays 4pm.  Tickets are $28, and are available by phone (773-528-9696) or at OvationTix.com (check for half-price tickets at Goldstar.com). More info at Strawdog.org.  (Running time: 85 minutes, no intermission)

Photos by KBH Media

  

artists

cast

Ed Dzialo (Man), Sarah Gitenstein (Rebecca), Sam Hubbard (Stephen), Kristen Johnson (Claire), Loretta Rezos (Woman), John Taflan (Minister)

behind the scenes

Josh Sobel (director), Madisen Dempsey, Sarah Goeden (assistant directors), Mike Mroch (set design), John Kelly (light design), Michelle Underwood (projection design), Raquel Adorno (costume design), Stephanie Diaz (puppet design), Jamie Karas (props design). Jeffrey Levin (sound design), Alexa Berkowitz (stage manager), KBH Media (photos)

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