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| • TRAILER • REVIEWS • SYNOPSIS • CAST & CREW • | ||||
| "...an
exquisitely rendered work thanks to the playwright, theatrical company and director." –Variety 3/26/07 (read full review) |
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" Vogel's
drama is brought to brilliant fruition by director Stuart Rogers
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"…unlike anything I've ever seen, this surrealistic, hard hitting play…must be seen by all theatre enthusiasts!" –Tolucan Times 3/28/07 (read full review) Past and present collide on a snowy Christmas Eve for a troubled family of five. Humorous and heart-wrenching, this beautifully written play proves that magic can be found in the simplest breaths of life. Combining the elements of Noh theatre and Bunraku with contemporary Western sensibilities, Vogel's Ride is a mesmerizing homage to the works of Thornton Wilder, including Our Town. A moving and memorable study of the American family careening near the edge of oblivion. "Brilliant . . . even more ambitious than Vogel's How I Learned to Drive . . . it covers more ground and is bolder in its storytelling. Vogel's language is at its most poetic, eloquent and elegiac. In fact, its vivid imagery rivals the prose style of any great American short story writer. The play sounds like it might have been adapted from a beautiful, undiscovered novella." - New Haven Register |
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CAST PUPPETEERS CREW Photos courtesy of Stuart Rogers, Billy Minogue and Sara Shapley This production is dedicated to the memory of John Bishop |
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REVIEWS |
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3/30/07 The Long Christmas Ride Home, Paula Vogel's semiautobiographical "puppet play with actors," is a delicate enterprise that could have easily descended into stylistic obscurity. From the starting point of one family's disastrous Christmas in the late 1960s, the play spirals off into an incisive examination of family dysfunction and abuse. Without an absolute synergy of production elements, Home could come across as embarrassingly mushy. The fact that many characters are portrayed by puppets, coupled with the play's lightning transitions in mood and setting, are just two of the challenges facing prospective interpreters. Fortunately, director Stuart Rogers and his crack team of actors and designers coalesce, seamlessly, in a beautifully realized production at Theatre Tribe. Meticulous to the last detail, Rogers' staging is as precise as it is emotionally gripping. Jeff McLaughlin's set suggests a wide variety of locales without burdening the actors with cumbersome scene changes. Luke Moyer's virtuosic lighting ranges from the shadowy to vivid explosions of primary colors. Also stunning is Ellen Mattesi's puppet design, from its hilariously X-rated "naked lesbian law students" to its prim, grim puppet-children, helpless extras in their parents' mindlessly vicious Punch and Judy show. Composer Thadeus Frazier-Reed's live percussion and shamisen music gibe perfectly with the show's thematic emphasis on Japanese culture and folk tradition. Shaun Duke and Mary Manofsky are the narrator/parents, domestic monsters headed for a Christmas catastrophe. Kerrie Blaisdell, Jeff Kerr McGivney and Luka Lyman play the puppet children, all grown up and involved in their own pathological relationships, while Douglas Lowry rounds out the cast. Reportedly, Vogel has requested that this play never be presented at Christmastime. Certainly, Home is no warm and fuzzy Christmas perennial. Yet its surprising final message of hope and human resilience resonates, whatever the season. 4/5/07 Puppets? A family getting presents on Christmas Eve? Yes indeed, but you're actually better off leaving the young ones home for this one. But even though 'tis no longer the season for such fare, go see The Long Christmas Ride Home anyway. Christmas Ride, a less frequently staged work by the always fascinating Paula Vogel (How I Learned to Drive, The Mineola Twins,) is getting a mightily affecting staging at North Hollywood's Theatre Tribe courtesy of director — and puppet master — Stuart Rogers. It's beautiful to look at, and, psychologically, it's a rich 85 minutes. In Christmas Ride, Vogel tracks a suburban family of five — mom and dad up front, their three puppet children in the back — for whom the term "in crisis" is being kind. They're headed home from a disastrous Christmas Eve dinner at the grandfolks' house. From that ride, the three kids — via flash-forward — are sprung into the future. Vogel, who delved into her brother's death from AIDS in 1992's The Baltimore Waltz, has returned to that same fertile ground here in a very different way. Japanese shadow puppets and traditional marionettes represent children Rebecca, Stephen and Claire and — later — their assorted lovers. Seven puppeteers, their bodies and faces hidden in black, work the magic. The puppets themselves, delicate pucker-faced little humans designed by Ellen Mattesi, are pretty magical themselves. The Long Christmas Ride Home is, per Vogel's labeling, "a puppet play with actors." Rebecca, the oldest (voiced by Luka Lyman), chafes bitterly against having to look after her younger siblings and at not being the favored child. Sensitive Stephen (Jeff Kerr McGivney) is in no way destined to become the man's man his father wanted. And golden girl Claire (Kerrie Blaisdell) doesn't exactly reap the benefits of being anointed her daddy's little treasure. Their adult incarnations (played by the same actors who supplied the puppet children's voices) make some rather interesting choices based on things that happened on that fateful Christmas Eve. Hurts, indignities and — improbably — even a certain amount of love bounce across the decades from suburban D.C. in the 1960s to San Francisco in the 1990s. The tale is played out via inventive staging, beautiful visuals (Luke Moyer is the lighting designer) and some rather explicit, but not crass, puppet fornication. The hard-hitting monologues by the three actors keep us firmly entrenched in this tragic but simple story as surely as the puppet work keeps us entertained and engaged in a completely different way. As Stephen, the spiritual heart of the play, McGivney is particularly winning, refusing to martyr the character or make him overly ethereal. Blaisdell and Lyman systematically tear open the wounds of Stephen's damaged sisters, and Shaun Duke and Mary Manofsky smoothly bracket the proceedings, playing their awful parents. Domestic disharmony — and its shattering consequences — doesn't get much more gripping. Rogers and his Tribe give the material equal parts edge and beauty, often at the same time. 4/2/07 If you saw Paula Vogel’s 1997 How I Learned to Drive, you’ll recognize in her later (2003) play The Long Christmas Ride Home similar family scenes plucked from the past, set during car rides and around kitchen tables. Vogel is particularly interested in the emotional complexities of abuse, both subtle and obvious, amidst the glow of nostalgia. No setting could be sweeter than Christmas holidays with the grandparents, a scene with philandering dad (the excellent Shaun Duke), seething mom (Mary Manofsky) and their three kids — puppets operated by Luka Lyman, Jeff Kerr McGivney and Kerrie Blaisdell. But dad and grandpa (Douglas Lowry) hiss at each other over dad’s spending habits, and the consequences turn into a living nightmare that will linger for years. In flash-forwards, the puppets melt away, and the puppeteers portray the adult children — two of them gay, one going down with AIDS in the Castro District. I’m not clear if how the kids turn out is supposed to be a consequence of dad’s dramatically loaded penchant for smacking the kids around, punching his wife, or accidentally spinning the car-with-family to the precarious edge of a cliff; I am clear that in How I Learned to Drive, Vogel’s compassionate portrayal of an uncle who got too close for comfort to the kids issued a direct challenge to our snap judgments. Here, the comparatively harsh, generic view of parenthood isn’t really softened by the puppetry and the tenderness of director Stuart Roger’s excellent Asian-influenced staging, though it’s certainly made more theatrical. Ellen Mattesi designed the wonderful stick puppets. 4/2/07 Paula Vogel's play is not exactly a sequel to Thornton Wilder's The Long Christmas Dinner, but it's a lineal descendant. Wilder, beneath his folksy exterior, was a tough, ruthless writer and an innovator whose time-telescoping and other nonrealistic techniques still influence avant-garde theatre. Vogel uses those techniques to a very different end. In The Long Christmas Dinner, Wilder compressed 90 years in the life of a family into a single Christmas dinner. Vogel stretches time instead, showing how a single traumatic Christmas -- they don't even get dinner -- continues to exact its price 30 years later. Jewish Dad (Shaun Duke) is unfaithful, and Catholic Mom (Mary Manofsky) is riddled with resentment. They bundle up their three children -- Rebecca, Stephen, and Claire -- to drive to Grandma's house for Christmas. In Act 1, the children are effectively played by expressionist Bunraku-style puppets, manipulated by visible onstage puppeteers dressed in black. Grandma (Douglas Lowery) is rather a ditz, while Grandpa (also Lowery) loathes Jewish Dad. Soon everybody is squabbling, Grandpa calls Dad a kike, Dad calls mama's boy Stephen a sissy, and all hell breaks loose on the drive home, scarring the kids for life. In Act 2 the puppeteer-actors shed their black jumpsuits to emerge as grownup counterparts of the kids. Rebecca (Luka Lyman) is, like her dad, unfaithful and is kicked out by her lover. Stephen (Jeff Kerr McGivney) has predictably grown up gay, and he too is dumped by his lover, with hideous consequences. And Claire, no longer Dad's little blond princess, emerges as a lesbian, who ardently seduces other blond princesses. To say any more would spoil the play's magic. It's an extraordinary production, in which the highly nonrealistic puppets (designed by Ellen Mattesi) are as touching as the terrific live actors, and director Stuart Rogers ably blends them all into a strange, moving, satisfying whole. This ain't your father's puppet show. 3/28/07 This show is billed as a puppet play with actors. A mind-bendingly heartwrenching theatrical experience unlike anything I’ve ever seen, this surrealistic, hard hitting play, in its L.A. premiere, must be seen by all theatre enthusiasts! When I was asked to review it I thought, “A Christmas play in March? How strange…” In fact, the brilliant playwright, Paula Vogel, specifically insists that this piece never runs at Christmastime. She is best known for her Pulitzer Prize winning play, How I Learned to Drive. My press kit states: “Beacause the disappointments of our families last all year long… This ain’t no Xmas story.” It is instead, a darkly daunting look at the affects of childhood, and the influence of family dynamics in shaping the complex journey to adulthood. Much of our inner values and “who” we become depends on our familial experiences form birth onward. Under the mesmerizingly inventive and impeccably timed direction of Stuart Rogers, the performances throughout are spellbinding! We witness the past, present, and future of a troubled family of five (1960s thru 1990s) as their personal destinies unfold. A compelling and unique combination (with humor laced in) of storytelling and puppetry in many forms, this is an unforgettably powerful production. Mary Manofsky as the unfulfilled mother and Shaun Duke as the philandering father (locked in a loveless union) are positively riveting! Also inspiring was Douglas Lowry in multiple roles. Miraculously, the three children (Claire, Stephen, and Rebecca) are played by life-sized puppets. Eerily and masterfully maneuvered by puppeteers (Christina Aimerito, Ida Anderson, Michael Rupnow, and Sarah Sundquist), their life-like movements and behavior were magical. Ingeniously and intricately designed and built by conceptual artist Ellen Mattesi, her visionary contribution was monumental. A trio of gut wrenching live performances by Jeff Kerr McGivney (Stephen), Luka Lyman (Rebecca), and Kerrie Blaisdell (Claire) in monologue scenes, as the dysfunctional kids, now adults, “come to life” telling their stories and sharing their outcomes. Unbelievable! Costuming (Courtney Lynn Iverson), lighting (Luke Moyer), set (Jeff McLaughlin), sound composer and amazing onstage musician (Thadeus Frazier-Reed) all set the tone with excellence. A beautiful and involving theatrical triumph…I do hope you’ll see this one! It is quite special! 4/12/07 The cold quoted above applies to both the inside and outside the car that carries this wretched family of five to Grandmother’s apartment for the holidays. There’s no yo-ho, yo-ho about it. Award-winner Paula Vogel’s play, done to a turn by the excellent Theatre Tribe under Stuart Rogers’ direction, is explicitly banned by the playwright from being produced at Christmas. The father, called Man (Shaun Duke) is Jewish and his wife, the mother, called Woman (Mary Manofsky) is Catholic. On top of this uncomfortable unit, Man spends most of his time mooning over his latest lover and Woman endlessly asks herself whether having another baby would help. Woman loves her constantly car-sick son Stephen, Man loves his baby girl Grace and nobody loves the oldest, Rebecca, who swears she will never have children. The children are played by puppets with wonderfully miserable faces and are voiced by the actors who will play them when they become adults. When the children are grown, they are just as miserable as their woe-faced puppet selves and just as unable to form healthy relationships as their parents. Each is shown standing beneath the window of the beloved who dumped him or her, screaming uselessly to get in, like Romeo on a bad hair day. Vogel’s use of humor and the fascinating puppets keeps the play from being a bleak exercise in disfunctionality and its monologues are many-layered from Stephen’s love of Japan with its exotic alien air of escapism to the sisters’ more typical push-pull between being wary of marriage and longing for love. There are hints that in the end at least one has a family and Stephen’s ghost finds rest in revisiting them. The final scene underlines this by reverting to that childhood car trip which almost ends in disaster until Man says, "Let’s go home!"” In Vogel-speak, this has emanations that home, whatever else it may be, is inescapable and indispensable. In addition to the child puppets, puppet designer Ellen Matesi has also created monstrous shadow puppets behind a curtain that are equally fascinating. These are superbly manipulated by black-clad puppeteers in bunraku fashion. Musician Thadeus Frazier-Reed adds an Oriental note on his samisen compositions, abetted by Lewis Keller on percussion and guitar. Rogers’ staging has the spare theatricality of Japanese theatre without losing sight of the home-grown sorrow of this American family. Stephen speaks of his love of Japanese culture and his hope that seeing his own through their outside eyes might enlighten him. It seems to be Vogel’s hope, too, and adds a layer of Brechtian observation to the play. As the adult children, Jeff Kerr McGivney is an awkwardly endearing Stephen, though sometimes hard to hear, and Luka Lyman a fierce Rebecca. Kerrie Blaisdell as Grace vividly paints the raging dismay of a grown-up Golden Girl growing old. Douglas Lowry plays Everybody Else, particularly impressive as Grandmother. Duke and Manofsky are excellent as Man and Woman. Vogel’s refusal to call them Mom and Dad underscores the alienation the children feel from the get-go. 3/26/07 Although Theater Tribe's L.A. premiere of Paula Vogel's "The Long Christmas Ride Home" is being advertised as "a puppet play with actors," it is as far removed from a standard puppet show as it is from traditional works dealing with the glories of Christmas. It is an exquisitely rendered work thanks to the playwright, theatrical company and director. The play is not flawless -- the second half is clunkier -- but it's admirably adventurous, generally effective and contains some of Vogel's most poetic and moving writing. The story begins with the titular ride, a family disaster that is a microcosm for the damage that continues throughout the children's lives. It starts normally enough, with the family visiting their grandparents for Christmas, the kids fighting all the way there. Rebecca (Luka Lyman), the oldest, thinks of herself as more mature than her squabbling siblings and occupies her mind thinking of boys. Stephen (Jeff Kerr McGivney), who isn't feeling well, ponders the concept of "the floating world" as described in Japanese art. Claire (Kerrie Blaisdell), the blonde "golden girl," is happy but confused to receive an expensive gold bracelet from her father (Shaun Duke). When that bracelet is accidentally broken, the tenuous peace in the family snaps violently, the repercussions of which reverberate for decades. In the first half of the show, all three of the children are portrayed by puppets and all voices are performed by Duke and Mary Manofsky as Man and Woman, respectively. Manofsky displays a brittle facade of strength underlain with a sea of misery as the mother, but she is also alive to the quirky humor of the play. Duke impressively alternates flashes of frightening temper with moments of gentleness and subtlety. The puppeteers who work in this sequence are phenomenal, with such detailed movements that the puppets quickly seem alive. The puppets never stop acting, even when the focus is not on them, which adds considerably to the illusion. The second half of the show depicts the now-grown children, portrayed by three fine actors, but the play falters as Vogel's writing slips from sublime to standard and stereotypical. The adult children are mostly cliches, the decision to use one as a saintly ghost regrettably maudlin. McGivney fares best, bringing a rueful wit to the role, although Lyman and Blaisdell each have moments of poignancy. Stuart Rogers' direction is masterful, drawing together such disparate elements as various types of puppetry, a Japanese-influenced score and brilliant production design into a cohesive whole. Ellen Mattesi's puppets have a hauntingly expressive quality that serves the production wonderfully. Luke Moyer's lighting highlights the emotional beats of the play with astonishing skill, and Thadeus Frazier-Reed's score is the heartbeat of the show. Reed's sound design is equally strong, and one effect, the simple noise of windshield wipers working in a deathly quiet car, encapsulates in a sound the terrible moment of an entire family afraid to speak. 4/07 *** 1/2
4/3/07 Though playwright Thornton Wilder is nowadays considered to be a somewhat outmoded mainstream writer, his 1931 one-act, The Long Christmas Dinner, pioneered many of the techniques of the modern avant garde. His play used a single Christmas dinner to examine 90 years in the life of a family, compressing time in an adventurous way. Paula Vogel’s play is not precisely a sequel to the Wilder work, but certainly it is a descendant. Where Wilder compressed time, Vogel stretches it out, to show how a single disastrous Christmas visit affected the children for the rest of their lives. Mom (Mary Manofsky) is Catholic, while Dad (Shaun Duke) is Jewish. On religion, they compromise, loyally attending The Unitarian Universalist Church, so that their children can later draw their own conclusions about God. Dad is serially unfaithful, and Mom knows it, so their marriage is fraying rapidly. Even so, they dutifully bundle their three children into the car to go to grandma’s house for Christmas dinner. Grandpa is apparently a rock-ribbed conservative who loathes his son-in-law, and Grandma finds all her Christmas presents in her apartment house’s trash room. (Douglas Lowry deftly manages to play both Grandma and Grandpa, and also doubles as the Unitarian minister.) E ven befo re dinner is serve danger erupts, with Grandpa calling Dad a kike, and Dad verbally and physically abusing his family. The most innovative aspect of the production is the decision to represent the children with three rather dourlooking puppets (designed by Ellen Mattesi), manipulated Bunraku style by onstage puppeteers dressed in back. The puppets are used cleverly, and their antics are both hilarious and unexpectedly touching. As the children grow into adulthood, the puppeteers shed their black jump-suits to assume the characters of their puppets. Rebecca, the eldest daughter (Luka Lyman), proves, like her father, to be incapable of fidelity. The mama’s boy and middle child Stephen (Jeff Kerr McGivney), predictably grows up to be gay, while daddy’s golden girl, little Claire (Kerrie Blaisdell), no longer a golden girl herself, devotes herself to seducing other golden girls. All come to grief on one level or another, though two manage to survive. In the end, like Wilder in Our Town, Vogel delivers a paean to life, spoken by someone no longer living. Vogel’s play has its undeniable flaws, despite some autobiographical echoes. The plotting tends to be schematic, and there ’s something uncomfo rt ably deterministic about the notion that the three children should all be permanently warped in much the same way by a single traumatic day. Surely, we’re more adaptable than that, and it’s awfully neat that the kids should turn out to be one gay, one lesbian, and one straight. There
is much that is rich and true in the writing, and director Stuart
Rogers and his terrific cast give it a resonant
3/29/07 Surely every unhappy family in America will eventually inspire a script. Anguished clans are such popular subjects that any playwright who wants to treat the same old issues had better find a new way of approaching them. Two current productions share not only this familiar topic but also a coincidence of similar flashpoints in their narratives. In events that happened about 35 years ago to characters in both Galatea and The Long Christmas Ride Home, arguments between a husband and wife in a car grew so heated that the distracted husband wrecked the vehicle. So are these plays stale peas in the same pod? Not at all. They look and sound completely different. Each is satisfying in its distinctive way. Frank Tangredi’s Galatea, staged by Alex Sol for Dreamhouse Theatre Ensemble, is the more realistic-looking. It’s broken into many short, representational scenes – perhaps a few too many. Its unhappy Hagen couple consists of irascible Al, a retired New York firefighter (Ronald Quigley), and depressed housewife Kate (Adrian Lee). They seldom speak without snarling. Yet the framework for their story isn’t so predictable. Merle, a young English sculptor living in Manhattan (Lorianne Hill), spots the dour Mrs. Hagen in a market and believes she would be the perfect model for Merle’s proposed project based on the legend of Galatea – the mythical character who was animated by a sculptor’s loving touch. Yet eventually it’s Al, not Kate, who responds most enthusiastically to Merle’s initiative. Tangredi gradually enlarges our views of the characters’ perspectives until we know them well. Quigley, who was a Pittsburgh firefighter for 22 years before relocating to L.A. five years ago, has an uncannily accurate take on crusty Al. Lee is careful to keep Kate’s features at least partially immobilized, as if she indeed springs from stone. And Hill keeps the sculptor’s brow furrowed – she worries about the implications of her intrusion into the family’s life. Ross Kramer as Merle’s boyfriend, who’s a fourth grade teacher, and Jacqueline Hickel as the Hagens’ cop daughter facilitate Tangredi’s masterful psychological sculpting. Paula Vogel’s sculpting in her The Long Christmas Ride Home is penetrating on a theatrical more than a psychological level. Inspired by a couple short plays by Thornton Wilder as well as Japanese imagery, she and Theatre Tribe director Stuart Rogers have created a thing of beauty out of materials that aren’t very beautiful at all. Vogel’s script is subtitled “a puppet play with actors.” Two girls and a boy, riding to their grandparents’ apartment for a Christmas dinner in suburban Washington, are portrayed by lifesize puppets, designed by Ellen Mattesi, with faces even more rigid than that of Kate in Galatea. Meanwhile, their philandering Jewish father and resentful Catholic mother in the front seat are played by actors (Shaun Duke and Mary Manofsky). The style is presentational, mostly in direct address to the audience. In later scenes, the adult children, now in relationships as poisonous as that of their parents, are played by actors (Luka Lyman, Jeff Kerr McGivney, Kerrie Blaisdell), while their lovers are played by puppets, of both the three-dimensional and the shadow varieties. The interplay between puppets and flesh-and-blood actors enables Vogel to emphasize contrasting qualities, such as the lasting impact of individual moments and the changes since then that are reflected in the actors’ faces. She also captures the contrast between the spare Japanese-style images – reflected in the set, the music, and textual references by the family’s Unitarian minister as well as in the puppetry –with the relatively rootless, mobile turmoil of Western culture. It’s a heady aesthetic brew that manages to elevate one family’s problems into something that’s paradoxically more evanescent and more eternal.
4/26/07
Puppetry, when done well, can be one of the most creative and intriguing art forms. A puppet can speak as a human does, but it can also have drum set logorrhea. They can be shadows or as real as the audience member next to you. Christmas Ride accomplishes all that and more (not to mention the hilarious lesbian puppet scene). Actors and puppets perform the play in a one act with the mother and father always as actors and the children as puppets in the past and actors in the present. The story focuses on a long car trip to visit the grandparents for Christmas. As all long cramped-in-the-small-car trips can do, emotions pour as the family undoes itself. This play a must see. It's been so popular, the run of show has extended throughout May. We recommend you hit the NoHo Arts District and hitch a ride at The Tribe Theatre. |
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© Theatre Tribe, 2007