Here’s a recipe for a crowd-pleasing holiday play: Take a working mother of three, her almost-chauvinist husband, two flaming neighbors, an uptight sister-in-law, the ghost of her dead hippie mother and two adorable street kids. Combine on a stage for three hours. Mix in historical tidbits about the pagan traditions that were co-opted for Halloween and Christmas, courtesy of a smart-aleck teenage girl and season with a sprinkling of humor taken straight from National Public Radio (co-playwright Marc Acito is a commentator on “All Things Considered”).
Holidazed and confused
Here’s a recipe for a crowd-pleasing holiday play: Take a working mother of three, her almost-chauvinist husband, two flaming neighbors, an uptight sister-in-law, the ghost of her dead hippie mother and two adorable street kids. Combine on a stage for three hours. Mix in historical tidbits about the pagan traditions that were co-opted for Halloween and Christmas, courtesy of a smart-aleck teenage girl and season with a sprinkling of humor taken straight from National Public Radio (co-playwright Marc Acito is a commentator on “All Things Considered”).
The result is the half-baked Holidazed, Artists Repertory Theatre’s holiday offering, back for a second production after its successful debut last year. The play calls for a certain suspension of disbelief—after all, its main plot point is unbelievable. That said, many of the challenges the characters face are achingly realistic, and it is a treat to see such well-thought-out characters in such outrageous situations.
Julia (Susannah Mars) finds relief from the holiday season when she, on the advice of her mother’s ghost (Vana O’Brien), hands a bag of Snickers to a homeless pregnant teenager, Luna (Ana Reiselman), and her friend Padre (Steve Rathje). Soon, Julia invites Luna to stay with her family, and all hell breaks loose. Her husband Scott (Duffy Epstein) objects, their children get into trouble at school when they share Luna’s pagan history lessons with their classes and menacing homeless people try to rob the family on Thanksgiving.
When Luna disappears, Julia goes off the deep end searching for her, enlisting the help of her gay neighbors, Gabe and Nicholas (Michael Mendelson and Todd Van Voris), to comb the worst neighborhoods in town. This leads to an ultimate metamorphosis on her part, where she comes to see how unjustly the poor are treated.
Holidazed has the requisite feel-good holiday ending and characters learn lessons about feminism, dealing with death and coming to terms with the fact that women tend to be more like their mothers than they care to admit. It treads dangerously close to a number of clichés, but manages to toe the line, remaining familiar, yet fresh.
For viewers of a certain age group, Holidazed closely parallels a number of plot points in that seminal prime-time drama, —wealthy parents with an established household wind up playing host to a smart, troubled teenager. He bonds with their biological child getting into trouble, causing marital problems but eventually winning over the heart of a doubtful parent.
What’s bizarre is that Holidazed—which is obviously a much more intellectual take on the same plot points, as it includes a subversion of gender roles, commentary about the commercial shallowness of the holiday season and alternative history lessons—actually has some of the same dialogue as early episodes of .
These similarities are the play’s only shortcomings, however (and to be fair, they might not even be shortcomings if you’re watching without an encyclopedic knowledge of ). A colorful cast of characters, a variety of complicated emotional subplots, a holiday drag show and a series of riotous send-ups of stereotypical stay-at-home mom Krystee (Michael Mendelson, whose drag performance is one of the play’s highlights) make this show, on the whole, a pretty unique piece of holiday entertainment.
