Review: Season's Greetings by Red Dragon Players, Austin High School
by Michael Meigs
Their institution is ancient by Austin standards, with 80 years of theatre history under its present name, but the Red Dragon Players themselves are younger than most thespians in the town. They perform at Stephen F. Austin High School, at 1715 W. César Chavez near Mo-Pac, in the Praes Theatre, an impressive and well-equipped space with stadium seating three-quarters of the way around the playing area.
The Red Dragons' Season's Greetings by Alan Ayckbourn played the first two weekends in December. It was an impressive, crisp and bittersweet comedy, delivered under the direction of Billy Dragoo with the snap and assurance of professional theatre.
High school players are necessarily young in years, but as this piece proves, through the consensual make believe of theatre they can transform themselves convincingly into characters of any age without the guignol of heavy makeup or caricature. For example, Brian Schwartz became Harvey, the sour 60-year-old uncle of this English family, with little more than a cursory touch of white in his hair for the first act. He inhabited that misanthropic, distrustful personality throughout with concentration and fierceness, providing the audience with moments of delighted laughter in the second act when he was repeatedly roused at night by untoward goings-on in the downstairs living room.
Appreciation goes to director Dragoo both for his coaching of the young talent and for his choice of the play. Ayckbourn's piece is a vigorous, busy portrait of a suburban family gathering for Christmas, with all the tensions and discomforts that enforced jollity can create. In addition to the growsing bachelor uncle Harvey, Ayckbourn introduces us to three couples: hosts phlegmatic shop-owner and tinkerer Neville (Derek Dorman) and his high-strung, emotionally needy wife Belinda (Aubrey Elenz), grown-up adolescent Eddie (Corbin Chase) and his wife Pattie (Mariah Stewart), very pregnant with their fourth child, and Bernard (Andrew Murray), a mediocre physician devoted to producing the annual Christmas puppet show, and his ditzy dipsomaniac wife Phyllis (Haleigh Holt), offstage during much of the first act as she duels with the lamb meant for Christmas dinner. The portraits are sharp and funny, filled in for us with staccato detail in conversations at random encounters, meals, television watching and some semi-spiteful exchanges between spouses.
Loose among these duels is Rachel (Catherine Schwartz), unmarried, in her late 30s, awaiting with impatience and trepidation the holiday visit of her latest male friend Clive, an unattached writer. Snow, delayed train connections and missed pickups mean that Clive (Mitchell Stephens) stumbles solo into this simmering Christmas brew.
Ayckbourn happily portrays for us the anguish of family rituals while preserving for us the feeling of precarious and precious bonds among all these people. Highlight of the first act was the Christmas dinner, finally delivered by the tipsy Phyllis; a highlight of the second act was Bernard's rehearsal of his well-meaning but inept puppet show. During all this, Clive the unattached newcomer is caroming among the disrupted affections of the spouses, completely disoriented, as both Rachel and Belinda become more and more distraught.
Every actor in this cast delivered a strong, nuanced performance. Aubrey Elenz as the needy, frustrated Belinda carried much of the overt action of the play -- not only as hostess but also as the most visibly vulnerable of these characters, all of them in need of love. Both Catherine Schwartz as unmarried sister Rachel and Mariah Stewart as the pregnant Pattie are equally as hungry for affection, breaking unexpectedly into crying jags that are simultaneously funny and touching. Haleigh Holt as the overfamiliar, overalcoholized Phyllis is a terrific comedienne. In general, the guys will be guys, fixed in the familiar, reassuring plod of living and minor amusements -- except for the overwhelmed visiting novelist and for Bernard, the physician.
Andrew Murray as Bernard gives us a gentle, disappointed man who dreams to escape into the impossible simplicity of puppet theatre. This year his puppet show is a version of The Three Little Pigs. As puppet master, Bernard orchestrates the show with sweet sincerity and utter incompetence. It's a shining moment in an entrancing, painfully funny play, and you might read it as the distillation of the family dilemma -- Bernard longs to amuse the children, whom playwright Ayckbourn never brings on stage, and he wishes to create a rosy world full of meaning for them. But life just doesn't offer itself to us or to anyone in that way. Instead, the show ends with a surprise, a bang, confusion and after brief panic, a visible, slow re-establishment of family order and relations.
Congratulations to players, staff and crew for this play, which captured more of the contemporary spirit of Christmas than all 13 of the Scrooges at work around the Austin area.
ALT looks forward to seeing more of what these remarkable young dragons can do.
EXTRA
Click to view program for Season's Greetings by the Red Dragon Players, Austin High School
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Season's Greetings
by Alan Ayckbourn
Red Dragon Players, Austin High School
