THE LONG CHRISTMAS DINNER by Thornton Wilder M. Hunter ccSCOOP Review At the Hawthorne Valley school recently, an attractive group of young actors presented The Long Christmas Dinner, by Thornton Wilder, a one-act play directed by David Anderson. As it should be, the production was spare. Wilder’s love of the empty stage must be appealing to Anderson, whose Hamlet and Under Milkwood prove that we audiences require very little besides good actors and the words of a genius.

However, the stage did hold a long table. It was rather shabbily dressed with red candles and dishes on a wrinkled, weary tablecloth. It had reason to be weary. For more than a half an hour it lay mute, supporting Christmas dinner after Christmas dinner after Christmas dinner, while generations of a family celebrated, suffered, repeated a family story, teased, quarreled, welcomed babies, grew up and grew old, uttered banalities, and died.

That may not sound like the making of a lovely evening in the theater, but it was. In the audience, we became attached to the life-tracking devices: We listened for the whooshing-ahead in time, which was signaled with a high-pitched bell, such as the kind a matron at table might use to summon a servant. We appreciated that the actors sometimes faded cinematically and revived in a new time period. We were interested when the new babies arrived following Anderson’s
convention—born stage right. When a family member drifted stage left, we knew—illness, death coming. We watched actors enter with youthful élan, mature in the next scene, and then reappear as different characters later on. We also knew they were us.

There was no time to become invested in individuals, but something important burrowed into our awareness. Oh. This is what being alive is. Days, hours, minutes, most of them mundane, but all of them profound, miraculous, and of limited duration. Wilder’s Our Town (“the finest American play ever written,” according to Edward Albee) does it better. But, the short play is a thrust in the same direction. (With superfluous music, an otherwise excellent composer, Ned Rorem, has smothered the existential breath out of Our Town, and many directors coat it with a layer of sugar. A David Anderson production would be welcome.)

I would like to connect some good moments in The Long Christmas Dinner to the individual young actors who created them; but alas, there was no program. There was a lovely entrance by _________ at the start of the play. There was the repressed pain of __________ as the unmarried daughter. There was the perfect rightness of __________ at the head of the table, serene mistress of her domain. There was the stolid delivery of __________ at his end of the table (carving the imaginary white meat at plate-level rather than turkey-breast level). There was __________as his son, releasing his
frustration and rebellion with truthful energy. At the end, there was__________ in her wonderful letter monologue followed by her slow, unsentimental death. The actors laid it out for us simply. This is.

The play was preceded by individual readings of Shakespeare sonnets and a Rilke poem. Shakespeare tempts us to intone—and to listen to our own delicious vowels, sometimes short-changing meaning. Occasionally the actors succumbed. (Anderson never does. You must see his Hamlet.) On the other hand, there was the thrilling, expressive, free-rolling voice of ________ reciting in German, incomprehensible to most of us, but full of “meaning.”

Editor's Note: The Long Christmas Dinner was performed by the High School Ensemble of Walking the dog Theater's After School Drama Program. It was directed by David Anderson, Executive Artistic Director of Walking the dog Theater. Brianna Fingar played Leonora; Jordan Sills played Charles; Paul Boothroyd played Roderick younger and Roderick older; Kelsa Summer played Lucia younger and Lucia older; Christian Roidt played Uncle Brandon and Samuel; Ahna Keane played Mother Bayard and Genevieve; Eileen Oelhof played Cousin Ermegarde.