Car Trouble
By Alexis Greene
The Long Christmas Ride Home
By Paula Vogel
Vineyard Theatre
108 E. 15th St.
Box office: (212) 353-0303
The last new plays by Paula Vogel to receive
major New York productions were The Mineola Twins and How
I Learned to Drive. The first was a rambunctious feminist satire,
the second, which won a Pulitzer Prize, a poignant drama of mingled
love and sexual abuse.
Now Off-Broadway's Vineyard Theatre has produced
Vogel's latest work, The Long Christmas Ride Home. But unlike
the others it feels transitional, unfinished, as though Vogel were working
out themes and characters that will appear more fully in another script,
as yet unimagined. While alluding to Thornton Wilder's one-acts--The
Happy Journey to Trenton and Camden and The Long Christmas
Dinner--and filled with references to Asian theatre, The Long
Christmas Ride Home is at bottom simply a partially formed American
family drama. Possibly autobiographical, it lacks the emotional force
that autobiography, and drama, should possess.
Like Wilder's The Happy Journey, Vogel's
Long Christmas Ride Home involves a family automobile trip.
But Wilder stresses the supposed icons of the American family experience:
unity, motherhood, children's moral upbringing. The one wrenching emotional
incident, which occurs between the mother and her son, is apparently
resolved.
By contrast, Vogel portrays a journey rife with
anxiety and poisonous private thoughts. The father (Mark Blum) would
rather be with his mistress than his wife (Randy Graff) or his three
children, the youngest of whom, Stephen (Will McCormack), threatens
to be carsick in the back seat. Christmas dinner with the mother's parents
explodes in physical violence, as does the ride home. Momentary peace
arrives only during a strange Unitarian church service, when the minister
(Sean Palmer) shows slides from his recent trip to Japan, and unhappy
Stephen absorbs their beauty and eroticism.
No one really recovers from that horrible car
ride, Vogel's play tries to demonstrate. Stephen and his sisters, Rebecca
(Catherine Kellner) and Claire (Enid Graham), grow up and enter unfulfilling,
sometimes abusive relationships that are no better than their parents'
marriage. The women behave self-destructively. Stephen contracts HIV
and dies. But though she tries hard, Vogel never makes the children's
grown-up lives as dramatic, or even as intriguing, as that never-to-be-forgotten
Christmas journey.
Vogel filters her play through the prism of Japanese
puppet theatre. During the car ride, the three children are represented
by large puppets, the marvelous creations of Basil Twist. Bundled in
winter coats and hats, the puppets perch on a high bench and are manipulated
expressively by the three adult actors, who stand behind their charges
and are aided, in the manner of Bunraku, by black-garbed puppeteers.
In the style of much classical Asian theatre, a character often speaks
another's thoughts. The father, sitting to one side, mimes shifting
gears and at the same time voices the thoughts of his wife and his children.
Both parents frequently refer to themselves in the third person. Only
later in the play, when the children grow up, and the adult actors perform
without puppets, do Stephen, Rebecca and Claire vent their own feelings.
Perhaps Vogel superimposes the techniques of
Asian theatre to give a twist to the American family drama, which for
decades has been unrelentingly realistic. In most of her plays Vogel
has toyed with dramatic form. In works like The Baltimore Waltz,
And Baby Makes Seven, and How I Learned to Drive, she
consciously veers away from the connective psychological tissue that
realistic writing allows. She asks us to fill the interstices of her
writing and make our own connections.
But in The Long Christmas Ride Home
Vogel puts us in a quandary. Form overpowers content. What, really,
are we to make of this superimposed, pseudo-Asian style, except that
it camouflages the play's weaknesses? What, after all, are we to make
of these three children when grown, each standing outside a lover's
door or beneath a window, spurned and angry? To be sure, childhood incidents
can permanently traumatize us. But when they become adults, Stephen,
Rebecca and Claire move us little. As in Baltimore Waltz, Vogel
again seems to be writing about her beloved brother, who died of AIDS
in 1988, but the Stephen we see here is a shadow of the human being
in the earlier play. Here he is only someone who, when rejected by his
much younger boyfriend, runs to a gay bar and hurls himself into ferocious,
unsafe sex. The play essentially begins and ends during that horrific
Christmas ride. The aftermath--whatever it truly was--remains untapped
and unshaped.
Mark Brokaw, who directed How I Learned to
Drive with such sensitivity and precision, brings the same eye
for detail and nuance to The Long Christmas Ride Home. Vogel
could not ask for a more exquisite production. From Basil Twist's puppets
and Neil Patel's spare design (a stage of light-colored wooden flooring
and wooden beams) to Mark McCullough's crystalline lighting, Jess Goldstein's
costumes and David Van Tieghem's tinkling, percussive music, Brokaw
has fashioned an elegant presentation. From the actors, especially Graff
as the mother, he has drawn three-dimensional performances where dimensionality
was not written. If at times the acting hits certain moments too hard,
it is only that the actors have run up against Vogel's cumbersome style
and, like this struggling play itself, found no way around it.