Performing Arts

FORT WORTH – With The Long Christmas Ride Home, Stage West has given audiences a typically excellent production, with direction (by Jerry Russell), acting and design that are all engagingly first-class.

Paula Vogel's script, however, is an intentional mishmash of styles that seems intriguing at first, but by the end of the intermission-free, 90-minute show, dissolves into a muddled mess.

Nearly 24 hours after having seen Saturday night's show, I'm still trying to figure out what Ms. Vogel was trying to say or accomplish. She touches on everything from familial angst to spousal abuse and adultery to AIDS as she relates the tale of a five-member family navigating – figuratively and literally – the holidays.

But none of it gels into a cohesive narrative, and it's impossible to pin a mood on.

In addition to actors, the show features nearly life-size puppets, scrims behind which action takes place in silhouette, dance and a slide show.

The family attends a Unitarian-Universalist church, where the Japanese minister shows traditional woodcuts on Christmas Eve (including, accidentally, one featuring an erotic encounter). This provides the author with an entrée into what proves an oft-clumsy melding of Western and Eastern dramatic traditions. (One character snarkily says Western audiences "don't know their Kabuki from their Noh, and never will.")

A trio of puppets "portray" the family's young children, with the puppeteers who manipulate them eventually stepping into the spotlight as the grown-up versions of the kids. The symbolism here is pretty obvious: that children, for the most part, act merely as puppets controlled by their parents' strings, unable to direct their own lives beyond the occasional tantrum or bickering among siblings.

Buddy Myers

Ginger Goldman (from left), Shannon Worthington and Josh Blann appear as both puppeteers and actors in The Long Christmas Ride Home at Stage West in Fort Worth.

Most of the talking takes place in the form of monologues, with the actors and puppeteers rarely interacting with one another. A time-honored rule of theater is that "acting is reacting," but there's little reacting to do here, as most times the actors are speaking directly to the audience.

The result is that, for the audience, the experience feels more like reading an exceptionally pretty book than watching theater.

It should be noted that this show is most definitely not for children, with its inclusion of explicit sex between a human and a grown-up puppet (and not in that cute Avenue Q way).

In her original stage directions, Ms. Vogel wrote, "[Stephen and anonymous partner] simulate a sexual act that means this play will never be performed in Texas." Well, it has been now. Although I'm not sure we really needed it.