The Washington Post
Performance: Washington, D.C.
20-Dec-90

The latter is a follow-up to "Greater Tuna," the account of life in the third-smallest town in Texas. As before, all the inhabitants – young, old, male, female, spiteful, and, well, slightly less spiteful are played by a pair of remarkable quick-change actors, Jaston Williams and Joe Sears.

They're no less remarkable this time around, and Tuna certainly hasn't changed its stripes. It remains a hotbed of political conservatism, redneck manners, religious fundamentalism, bouffant hairdos and rampant bad taste.

The populace is caught up in the annual Christmas yard display contest, sponsored by Radio Station OKKK. The little theater group has plunged headlong into rehearsals for "A Christmas Carol” by Charles Dickens, despite the possibility that the electricity may be cut off on opening night. Didi Snavely's used weapons store ("If we can't kill it, it's immortal") is doing a brisk trade in gifts and favors. And all over town, people are wishing one another well ill. Tuna never was a haven for brotherly love, and the holidays haven't exactly warmed it up.

The new script – written by Williams, Sears and Ed Howard – doesn't have the satisfying dawn-to-dusk unity that "Greater Tuna" did. It spreads the action out over three days and allows what was already a hearty spirit of exaggeration to get out of hand now and again. But the ingredients still make for an immoderately funny evening. Sears and Williams know this world well. If they're quick to point out its shortcomings, they are never mean-spirited.

In fact, you immediately sense that as performers they relish the very eccentricities they are skewering. Tuna is, after all, a bastion of unbridled individualism. Whatever else they may be – drunks, boobs, troublemakers or whiners – Tuna-ites are colorful. An actor can dig right in.

Actually, the womenfolk seem to have gotten the upper hand since we last visited the place. The real stars of "Greater Tuna" turned out to be Aunt Pearl Burras, a large-bosomed matron not above poisoning pesky poodles: Vera Carp, a zealot in cat glasses who headed the town's anti-smut drive; and Bertha Bumiller, a put-upon housewife struggling to keep three obnoxious children in line with no help from a wandering husband.

They're back, more prominently than ever. Bertha (Sears), violating her good Baptist, principles, will even allow herself to down some spiked punch and dance to the box step at the OKKK Christmas party. Vera (Williams) is none too happy, in her role of censor, that carolers are praising a "round young virgin," until it is pointed out that " 'round yon virgin” is what’s being sung. Then she refocuses her considerable fury on ferreting out the bounder who's defiling the Christmas yard displays and may cause her to lose first place for the first time in 15 Yules.

As for Pearl (Sears, again), she has now armed herself with a slingshot and is taking after the blue jays. "They're like a lot of people," she sighs, clearly wishing it weren't true, "loud and pushy." Sears and Williams have these women down pat, and seeing them in "A Tuna Christmas” is almost like meeting up with old neighbors.

But they've also expanded the cast of characters – most prominently with Inita Goodwin and Helen Bedd, two don't-mess-with-me waitresses at the Tastee Kreem, who pride themselves on being "aspiring career women." New, too, is Joe Bob Lipsey (Sears), the temperamental director of the Tuna Little Theatre, who snaps, when his artistic judgment is challenged, "I've been to Waco."

If I've counted right, between them the actors are playing 22 roles – establishing some characters with no more than a couple of lines and a stance. (That doesn't take into account. the midgets who turn up at the window of the Tastee Kreem and whose overgrown hair is about all we get to see of them.) More than the continuous dexterity, however, what is truly remarkable about “A Tuna Christmas" is the way Sears, Williams and Howard, who acts at their director, manage to inject little moments of heartache into the proceedings.

We expect to laugh at these rubes and we do. I'm not so sure we expect to feel for them. But life is not without sadness in Tuna. Love is as much a disappointment there as elsewhere. And on a starry night, a man can look up and know just how lonely he is. Maybe that's why Petey Fisk (Williams), Tuna’s one-man humane society, fights so gallantly for the animals. They keep us company in the vastness. If "A Tuna Christmas" is a cartoon, it is a cartoon with soul.

Linda Fisher's costumes are perfect – each outfit a social critique. And Loren Sherman has enhanced the basic Tuna set – an all-purpose room plopped down in the wide-open Texas spaces – with a variety of Christmas trees. Judy Rasmuson's artful lighting further advances the distinct sense of time and place.

We're a long way from Grovers Corners – geographically and literally. But this woebegotten town is slowly acquiring a mythical reality. Entertaining as they are, Sears and Williams continue to pin down a patch of America in "A Tuna Christmas." It's a small-minded America, and not always beautiful. But it's proudly and fiercely original. And bless it for that.