"Holiday Memories" by Truman Capote
Staged version of two of Capote’s short stories by Russell Vendenbroucke: told in two parts
Directed by Michael Hammond
New Repertory Theater at the Arsenal Center for the Arts
Charles and Mosessian Theater
December 10, 2012, runs through December 23, 2012
Jon Savage, scenic designer, Molly Trainer, costume designer,Chris Brusberg, lighting designer,
Edward Young, sound designer, Amelia Gossett, properties designer,Christine Lomaka, production stage manager
Sentimentally rendered stories and the name Truman Capote aren’t usually associated with each other but in the New Rep Theatre’s production of “Holiday Memories” they fuse together like incense and myrrh. The entire production, from set to costume to music to lighting is a gem of anecdotal story telling and theatrical execution.
Capote’s two short stories, A Thanksgiving Visitor 1967 and Christmas Memories 1956 are set in the Depression era rural Alabama household of distant relatives into which Buddy’s (young Truman’s) wayward mother has deposited him like a summer hat that’s gone out of fashion.
Truman Capote’s evocative prose can describe the depths of torment caused by a schoolyard bully, the redemptive power of friendship, and the ability of imagination to sustain life in impoverished circumstances. It’s a warm reminiscence of his two years in a mildly dysfunctional household in rural Alabama before Capote became everything you can read about in Wikipedia.
Whether you have your own softly burnished memories of the holidays that you’d like to have rekindled or you’d like to borrow these two gently told tales, you’re in for a treat.
You don’t have to dive into the theater program to grasp what is transpiring in the two acts. Plain and simple, it’s the story of a loving intergenerational friendship that transforms the lives of Buddy, Michael John Ciszewski playing the role of a 7 year old Truman Capote, and Miss Sook, his sixty year old distant cousin, played by Adrianne Krstansky.
Marc Carver, as the 35 year-old Capote, and young Buddy take turns telling bits of the Capote’s short stories directly to the audience. Woven between are scenes enacted by Buddy, Miss Sook and three other members of the cast who play minor roles of the bully, a local moonshiner and the other relatives who share living in this household.
Buddy, dressed in knickers, and Sook, in her sack of a brown housedress keep their southern accents steady throughout the show. Truman, impeccably dressed in a tailored navy suit, shows how much distance he put between himself and his southern heritage with his polished urban English.
The Thanksgiving Visitor (Act 1) is based on Capote’s experience of being bullied at school by a larger and older boy. Sook has the indomitable ability to strain their hardscrabble life through a sieve that allows only the good parts to pass through and willfully ignores the hurtful parts that remain. Her solution is to create a friendship between the boys by inviting the bully and his family to Thanksgiving dinner. The results are powerful and unexpected. Sook’s declaration to Buddy at the end of A Thanksgiving Visitor is holiday lesson number one: "You know what the one unforgivable sin is, Buddy? Deliberate cruelty."
The second act, Christmas Memories, is a worth the price of admission all by itself. It’s centered on what Sook calls “Fruitcake Season” in which she enthusiastically enrolls Buddy to help her make 31 fruitcakes. "Fruitcake fuels the heart, it's fruitcake weather!" she shouts.
They don’t have two pennies to rub together. Through narration, we learn that they spent months organizing little events for which they can charge a penny a ticket. Their late night meetings to count their coins show that uneducated Sook has trouble with her figures but no trouble persisting until she’s accumulated enough money to purchase ingredients for her cakes.
Director Michael Hammond pulls out all the stops when he stages Sook and Buddy’s excursions to the local moonshiner Mr. Ha Ha to buy liquor for her fruitcakes and a foray into the woods to chop down, drag home and decorate an enormous Christmas tree with home made ornaments. The two endearing scenes come across as tenderly acted tone poems choreographed and performed with joyous simplicity, augmented with music and wonderful hand colored pen and ink drawings projected on the screen deep behind the stage.
Whether or not Sook’s kindness and generosity became models for Capote’s future behavior is doubtful but they certainly touch us as she describes her list of recipients. Besides the obvious donations to friends and relatives, she is way ahead of the curve in her random acts of kindness. One goes to a couple from out of state who got lost and showed up at the house earlier in the year, one goes to a neighbor who’s fallen on hard times, one goes to a shopkeeper who is lenient with credit, and one is wrapped up in brown paper and sent to President and Mrs. Franklin Roosevelt (who reportedly send her a thank you letter).
Throughout the play, the director and the actors do so much with so little, just the way Capote remembers himself and Sook in this gauzily recollected holiday season.
Marc Carver and Michael John Ciszewski as the older and younger Truman Capote give solid performances but the heart of the cast is Adrianne Krstansky as Sook. With words and gestures, she strikes a delicate balance between her eternally childlike outlook and the homespun practicality and wisdom of a self-sufficient country woman.
The warmly lit set features two tall honey-colored hewn wood panels on each side of the stage that serve as beds, cupboards, windows, coatracks, even a piano. A screen centered behind the set is used to project hand-colored pen and ink sketches or to cast characters in silhouette. Rarely do the elements of a set add so significantly to the arc of a play.
Sook’s dream of buying Buddy a bicycle for Christmas remains just that. The final scene of the two of them flying the kites (projected on the screen) they made for each other is wistfully brilliant.
“It’s hard enough not to get what you want for Christmas, Buddy. Even harder than that is not being able to give someone what they really want,” Sook says to Buddy in final scene.
Sook is a simple woman who never lost a childlike ability to squeeze joy from the corners of everyday life. Without her influence, it’s hard to see how Buddy, a ‘sissy’ and an odd loner, would have survived anywhere, let alone rural Alabama.
Photo: Andrew Brilliant Photography
A lovely review.
Posted by: Deirdre O'Connor | December 17, 2012 at 12:42 PM
This is exactly what I saw and felt!
Posted by: Ann Baker | December 18, 2012 at 01:25 PM