The Boston Herald
Performance: Boston, MA
22-Oct-92

If you need a little Christmas - a down-home Longhorn version, that is - you must get yourself over to the Shubert for "A Tuna Christmas," an antidote to "The Nutcracker" if ever there was one. The entire population of Tuna, Texas, the third smallest town in the state, is celebrating Christmas Eve with a Peyton- Place vengeance by way of "Saturday Night Live." The place is brought to life by just two actors, Jaston Williams and Joe Sears, using rapid costume and character changes.

Between them, Williams and Sears play 22 different people, beginning with Thurston Wheelis and Arles Struvie, the town's newscasters on station OKKK

As they amble on and off the stage, they make remarkable transformations that include every type, age and gender that can be imagined. While the resentments and jealousies are sharpened by the tension around the annual yard-trimming contest, there's some kindness at the edges. Even Aunt Pearl Burras who lures blue jays to their death by slingshot - first singing Texas folksongs to them - has love in her heart for her juvenile delinquent nephew, Stanley Bumiller.

Sears is large and beefy, perfect as Aunt Pearl in her shapeless dress and sensible shoes, or Ike Thompson, his bare arms hanging over the half-door to the Tastee-Freeze restaurant. Williams is whippet-thin, with legs that need no apologies in high heels as the waitress Helen Bedd and the town social climber, Vera Carp. The succession of characters they play appear and reappear, an old vaudeville trick decked out in boughs of holly.

Directed by Ed Howard, who wrote the script along with Williams and Sears, "A Tuna Christmas" with its fragmentary plot about the mysterious phantom who's out to sabotage the yard decorations, unfolds through a series of vignettes between two characters at a time. However, you could swear that there are often more than two on stage through the adroit use of an extra pair of boots, a wig appearing over a half-door, and other tricks of the trade.

It's hard to decide which are funnier, the rapid-fire one-liners that the characters hit to each other, or the sight-gags, led by a parade of Christmas trees decorated to the taste of each of the townsfolk. Thus, Didi Snavely, who runs the local used gun shop, has a tree tastefully hung with Uzis and hand grenades, topped by an angel in a gas mask. Vera has the largest tree, well suited to her aspirations. It's trimmed in signature pink to match her cat-eye glasses. The interior single setting, designed by Loren Sherman, is painted with scenes of the far-off mesas.

The costuming is a take on the best that J.C. Penney's catalogue has to offer, providing Bertha Bumiller with a Christmas green polyester vest and pants suit, her poinsettia-trimmed blouse as the perfect accessory (and earrings that blend in). The others are equally well turned out for small-town party-time.

If the characters are mostly mean-spirited in hilarious fashion, there's still a Christmas message that manages to shine through. Near the end, when the frantic pace slows down, some sentimentality trickles in as Petey Fisk the animal lover begs for peace on earth, and Bertha and Arles, two lonely people, find each other at the OKKK Christmas party where no one else has bothered to come.