BWW Reviews: Open Stage's A CHRISTMAS MEMORY Is Worth Remembering To Catch

There are memory plays, and there are memory plays. The primary example of a memory play in most theatre-goers' minds is no doubt Tennessee Williams' THE GLASS MENAGERIE, which isn't likely to make people have warm, fuzzy holiday associations with anything. On the other hand, there's Williams' contemporary, Truman Capote, whose short story, "A Christmas Memory," was published in Mademoiselle Magazine in 1965, back when we had magazines, and when magazines published excellent literature and reporting (yes, the days you really could read "Playboy" for the articles - those days truly did exist, oh young ones). Its opening, "Imagine a morning in late November. A coming of winter morning twenty years ago." is a classic piece of sparse but evocative writing characteristic of all of Capote's best work, and insured that the story would become the sort of holiday classic that "The Gift of the Magi" and "A Child's Christmas in Wales" already were.

It's hard to leave a piece this fine unadapted for stage; the first time it was done was in 1991, by Malcolm Ruhl and Russell Vandenbroucke; in 2010 it was done again, by Broadway musical veterans Larry Grossman and Carol Hall (BEST LITTLE WHOREHOUSE), with a book by Duane Poole, and it first staged that year in Palo Alto, California, a place where they don't have coming-of-winter mornings to embrace the way we do, but where the audience was willing to meet a day like that on stage. In this currently unseasonably warm December - why is it 61 degrees in Pennsylvania as I write this? - we are able to embrace that coming-of-winter morning on stage at Open Stage of Harrisburg, where A CHRISTMAS MEMORY is being staged in the best possible setting, their theatre, where the audience can truly feel that it's sitting in the kitchen with Buddy and Cousin Sook as she bakes.

The adult Buddy Faulk, deftly and touchingly handled by Stuart Landon, narrates, as the slightly fictionalized Capote himself, returning to his cousins' home in Alabama where it feels to the reader, or to the audience of the play, as if he spent his life - in reality, it was only two years that Capote lived with his cousins as a child - when the last cousin dies, to settle the estate. The only future-time characters, who look back on the events of the Christmas of 1933, are adult Buddy and elderly Anna the maid (a charming Sharia Benn) who recall Buddy's early life at the Faulk cousins' home.

Opening with "Alabama Fruitcake," an ode to their holiday goal of baking as many of the holiday confections as possible, young Buddy (Peter Ariano, who has real stage presence) and his elderly Cousin Sook, played with real and convincing feeling by Anne Alsedek, the show runs the gamut of Christmas season emotions, from the highs - accomplishing goals with presents, and enjoying a Christmas morning with family - to the depths... discovering that Buddy's being shipped to a military academy. In between come the other emotions, such as annoyance with the older neighbor girl, Nelle Harper (played by high school junior Kara Miller), who, in this piece of fictionalized biography, is presumably cover for Capote's childhood friend Harper Lee (author of "To Kill a Mockingbird" and eventually Capote's assistant on his "In Cold Blood"), and fear of Native American moonshiner Haha Jones, who provides the whiskey needed for Sook's famous fruitcake.

Fruitcake is the metaphor here for all of the joys of Christmas - family, home, love, warmth. Sook bakes them for people she barely knows to express friendship or thanks, her childlike, generous spirit spilling over in the holiday season. It's no wonder that she is the young Buddy's closest friend and confidante; she's kept from being ruined by the same bitter adulthood as her sister Jennie (Bryden McCurdy) and brother (absolutely delightfully played by Anthony M.C. Leukus, who also plays the frightening Haha Jones). It's also Buddy and Sook's downfall, as it requires whiskey from Haha Jones - and if only Sook, in the way of all doting, foolish parental figures, hadn't thought trying the dregs of the booze wouldn't hurt young Buddy, military school might have been averted.

Military school is Jennie Faulk's threat all the way through the play, a sword of Damocles hanging over Buddy and Sook's heads. If Sook doesn't teach Buddy enough, if Buddy doesn't stop dwelling in the kitchen with Sook, if Buddy doesn't... Military academy is masculinity, the hinted-at problem with Buddy, who enjoys Sook's kitchen apron-strings; he's not sufficiently masculine, he needs toughening up in order to dwell in the real world. It's coded text for Capote's later-flamboyant effeminate image; it's hard, thinking of Capote, not to remember his early publicity photos with flowing hair, wild hats, and caped shoulders. The little gay boy needs to have the problem beaten out of him with uniforms and marching - it's never stated, but as well-known as Capote was when the story was published, it's intended to be clearly understood.

Sharia Benn's "Detour" is a masterpiece of belting, a surprise while she's playing the elderly Anna, but the song, about always wanting to see what's around the next road, is classic, and indicates the wonder with which the team of Buddy and Sook, in 1933, saw the world. Leukus, Ariano, and Landon hit one out of the ballpark with "Nothing More Than Stars," an eleven o'clock trio that comes in surprisingly early in the second act but that also touches the theme of wondering and wandering that Sook and young Buddy shared. (And if any existing Christmas carol were to be sung during the show - none is - "I Wonder As I Wander" would be that song.)

As the adult Buddy says, recalling Williams' GLASS MENAGERIE narrator, when asked by the elderly Anna about his difficulty writing since his first successful book, "I could never write that book again, and I could never be the young man that had." Life changes everyone, and time, Anna reminds him, only travels in One Direction - recalling his past years with Sook gives warm memories, but as an adult, he has nothing of his childhood with her left but those memories, cut short by what the reader/audience knows was the unsuccessful effort by well-intentioned family to "make him a man". (Capote was in fact sent to military school - but by his mother, and the experiment didn't last long.)

This is a Christmas play for everyone who loves Christmas... and one that at the same time is the antithesis of everything that people who hate Christmas shows dislike about them. It's not a forcibly chipper parade of gaily costumed children or elves and a Santa, with tons of popular carols. It's exactly what it professes to be, a writer's recollection of one Christmas in his childhood, with an ending that's satisfying to the story itself but isn't infused with joy, laughter, and wild smiles. It's a bittersweet story of a childhood Christmas, one that can be as sweet as candied cherries in that fruitcake at one moment but as bitter as the pecans in it at the next, with songs that reflect just those points. It's beautifully acted, with some fine directing by Donald Alsedek, and is well worth the time to catch it.

One important point for those of us swayed by the power of Cuteness: There is one cast member in the show who is the undoubted star, whose charisma is so powerful that she's rarely on stage and commandeers it when she is on, even with no dialogue, and she is clearly a diva, known, like other such, only by her first name. Sook has a dog named Queenie who's central to moments of the show, who is played by the lovely and talented Sheba (one name, yes, just like Cher, Madonna, or Ke$ha). Be prepared for the distraction of her total adorability, especially when she rides around in the pram. With her looks and charm, she's bound for stardom.

At Open Stage through December 29. For tickets, call 717-232-6736 or visit openstagehbg.com.

Photo courtesy of Open Stage of Harrisburg

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