A CHRISTMAS MEMORY IN PALO ALTO
TheatreWorks presents…..
A Musical adaptation of Truman Capote’s
A Christmas Memory
Memory is a way of holding onto the things you love,
the things you are, the things you never want to lose.
The Wonder Years
If you read Truman Capote ‘s short story of a seven-year-old child abandoned by his mother and living with the cousin who shares his sense of wonder, you would have to be made of granite to get through it without dissolving into tears. Elizabeth Lawrence says, “There is a garden in every childhood, an enchanted place where colors are brighter, the air softer, and the morning more fragrant than ever again.”
It is this garden that Capote brings to life for us in his beautiful symphony of words: “Imagine a morning in late November. A coming of winter morning more than twenty years ago. Consider the kitchen of a spreading old house in a country town. A great black stove is its main feature; but there is also a big round table and a fireplace with two rocking chairs placed in front of it. Just today the fireplace commenced its seasonal roar.”
Robert Kelley does a masterful job of recreating the mood, the tension and the spirit of the rural south during the depression and Allison Conner’s costumes are just right, down to Sook’s bobby socks and her gingham apron. Joe Ragey has designed the perfect sets for the piece and the staging recaptures the exact mood of the time. Each visual moment is an unforgettable painting from long ago.
Penny Fuller and Gabriel Hoffman capture the spirit of the piece and cement it into your memory so the audience cannot forget the beauty and the magic we all can make if we dare to kindle our imaginations. Hoffman is Capote as a child and his chemistry with Fuller, his retarded, childlike cousin, over fifty years his senior is worth the entire production. They sweep you into the story and outshine every character on that stage.
A Christmas Memory is a musical and although the songs are at times delightful and always nice, they are an unnecessary intrusion on the sweep of this sensitive painting of growing old and growing up. 1933 was not a fun time. People were homeless, jobless, frightened and hungry and The South suffered most of all. Somehow people managed to create hope and love out of the shambles of their desolation and fear and this is the story that lies beneath Capote’s lovely memoir. It is the one Robert Kelley tries to bring back to us on the TheatreWorks stage and he succeeds. The script however does not.
The main problem here is pace. One can handle just so much sweetness and nostalgia before it sours and writer Duane Pool evidently didn’t know when enough was enough. The other actors all have their moments on stage, but they are all acting, not being. Richard Farrell is a consummate 1933 postman, but he isn’t real. He also plays Buddy’s uncle and Haha Jones and in each role he just misses the human connection. Cathleen Riddley does her best in an inadequate, poorly developed role and makes it as human as anyone can.
But if you remember childhood, its fears and its immense need, you won’t care a whit about anything but the gossamer web of love that binds Buddy and Sook to one another. It reaches out to you the moment the two of them appear on that stage and all the rest of the action fades into the background. In Capote’s story he describes his cousin: “In addition to never having seen a movie, she has never: eaten in a restaurant, traveled more than five miles from home, received or sent a telegram, read anything except funny papers and the Bible, worn cosmetics, cursed, wished someone harm, told a lie on purpose, let a hungry dog go hungry.” And you love her all the more for her innocence and her belief that good and evil are absolutes. It is this faith she gives to Buddy and as you watch them wheel their baby buggy across the stage to gather pecans or fly their kites in the air toward a heaven as real to them as I Pods and computers are to the fools of today, you are lost in their world and you never want to leave.
Sadly, most of the cast have no idea what the real depression felt like, the combination of hope and despair, the hunger for things you will never find and the irrepressible need to look for it anyway. Hoffman and Fuller get it….and for them alone it is worth twice the price of a ticket to see TheatreWorks A Christmas Memory.
A Christmas Memory continues through December 26 at the Lucie Stern Theater, 1305 Middlefield Road in Palo Alto
Tickets $19-$67.00 650 463 1960 or www.theatreworks.org