The+Long+Christmas+Ride+Home+Critique

“The Long Christmas Ride Home” is a one-act play written by Paul Vogue. Vogue’s drama tells the story of a dysfunctional family on Christmas day as they drive to a Christmas church service as well as to the mother’s parent’s home for dinner. The three children, Steven, Claire, and Rebecca, are played by puppets and puppeteers in traditional Japanese bunraku style. The mother and father are played by human actors. The plot of the play is introduced when during the car ride back from the grandparent’s house, tensions are high from an altercation between the father and the grandfather. The mother, who is clearly distraught from the fight and tired of her husband’s adultery, turns to her partner and sarcastically exclaims “What a wonderful Christmas you’ve given me”. The father responds violently and turns to slap the mother. The scene is in slow motion when the father reaches out to hit his spouse. From that scene on, we are flash-forward to when the children are grown up so that we can see how this Christmas evening affected them for the rest of their lives. The plot is clearly written and easy to identify. The slow motion of the scene emphasizes how one simple violent affected the children and their outlook on love and self-worth. The slow-motion scene gives the audience time to contemplate what is happening and register the moment into their own lives. The audience may not be able to relate to violent acts committed by a parent, but it makes you consider how arguments or harsh words/attitude affected one’s own youth. Each character and their personal stories are gradually created for the audience. Perhaps the best scene that describes the children’s characters is the Christmas dinner that the grandparents are throwing at their house. The grandparents, who are also puppets, give each of the children a gift that the grandmother finds in the neighbors’ garbage. This trait no doubt arises from the grandparents living within the Great Depression and their acquired appreciation for “what others throw away”. Steven receives a hat with a hole in the top, Claire is given a pair of fingerless gloves, and Rebecca is given a scarf with a large stain. In each of the children’s flash-forward monologues, these gifts are incorporated into the scenes, signifying that the children internally appreciated the understanding the grandparents had for “the beauty in the common”. This represents that even though the children don’t value themselves, they still have use and beauty. The father’s gifts to the children tell a different story. The father gives Steven a soccer ball. Here, the father is almost forcing Steven to take on a more “masculine” attitude by giving unathletic Steven a gift that he will never use. This is even more apparent when the father tells Steven to take his “pansy” self to the car with no dinner when Steven wants to hold Claire’s gift. As for Claire’s present, the father gives her a beautifully intricate gold bracelet with little charms. He obtains this gift as he is shopping for an expensive necklace for his mistress, Sheila. The name Sheila has an Irish origin and means “heaven” which has an ironic twist on her adultery with the father. It also adds another emphasis on the fact that the father met Sheila at church, a place where adultery is an ultimate sin. The fact that he thought of only Claire during his purchase clearly shows that Claire is his favorite child. It also shows that the father feels no shame in his affair because he is able to mix in his other life with his thought and actions for Sheila. Rebecca received a diary from her father. Her feelings toward the gift are the same as Steven’s: she will never use this because her life has nothing interesting to write about. However, unlike Steven, Rebecca keeps her father’s gift until she is an adult, writing about her daily life and emotions. Even though Rebecca resented the gift, she keeps it and uses it until adulthood, inadvertently telling the audience that she craved her father’s recognition and attention that he gave to Claire. The costumes are very minimalist for this show. The father and mother are dressed in typical outfits from the fifties. The mother wore a beige dress with a fur overcoat and a short hairstyle that flipped out at the ends. The father dresses also in a beige suit with a hat, looking well-groomed and clean. The puppet children are also dressed in modest, childish outfits that suit the idea of attending a church service on Christmas day. The family’s costumes tell the story of a perfect, wholesome family on the outside but the audience comes to know that this family is far from perfect. This adds a sense of sad irony in that we are among families who seem perfect on the outside and we envy them; however, every family has their misfortunes and imperfections. The puppeteers are dressed in complete black from head to toe, wearing a black translucent veil over their faces. This allows the audience to focus on the puppets and their interactions with the parents. As the audience learns more and more about the children and their dynamic within the family, we are introduced to the puppeteers behind the puppets. The puppeteers peel back their veils and begin to talk and express their inner emotions. This signifies the children’s thoughts and feelings becoming more apparent and important. The set is very simple but extremely creative. The three screens upstage have images projected onto to them from behind stage that give the necessary backgrounds for the scenes such as a snowy forest the car is driving through, the grandparent’s home, and the Unitarian church. The props used in the sets are minimalist to go with the simple backdrop. The “car” is two rolling stools for the parents and an old piano to represent the back seat for the children to sit. All of the presents used for the Christmas dinner scene from the father are large and over-exaggerated. The ridiculous props force the audience to look at them with distaste as we know that the father put no effort or love into the gifts except for Claire’s, his “golden child”. During Steven’s monologue talking about his experience fighting AIDS, the three screens in the back display a watery surface with splashes of color periodically dropped onto the surface. This creative display of vibrant colors draws the audience’s attention to the screens as they listen to adult Steven tell the audience his pains and tribulations. The display creates an eerie feeling in that the vibrant colors of red, blue, green, and yellow which should be perceived as cheerful, signify the deadly disease ravaging his body. The colors slowly spread over the water until the entire frame is filled with a mixture of colors, just as the disease slowly took over Steven’s body. All of these set elements do an exceptional job of putting all the attention on the actors and their dilemmas while creating the appropriate moods and atmospheres. The music incorporates Japanese culture and traditional Christmas songs. The music played during the Christmas church service the traditional Christmas songs such as “I Saw Three Ships” and “God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen” are played in a Japanese style using what sounds like the Japanese instrument, the koto. This fuses two different cultures in a new interesting way that sounds like it does not work or flow completely. This goes hand in hand with the idea of the Unitarian church where the mother is a Catholic and the father is a Jew. The parents take their children to the Unitarian church because they want their children “to choose what they believe”. This forcing of the union of two very different views of life, Catholic and Jewish, is messy and dysfunctional, and is shown in the way that the children, especially Claire, continue to ask their parents “What do we believe?”. Another instance of sounds occurs when a single bell chimes as the children thank their father for their gifts they received. Each time the children open their gifts, they give a short monologue on their feelings about their father’s incompetent gifts (except for Claire’s bracelet). This is one of the first times we’ve heard the puppeteers speak for their puppets. The bell chiming immediately causes the children to thank their father for the gifts. It’s as if they’ve snapped back to a reality of which their true inner desires do not matter, especially to their father. The theme of this play arises while a guest speaker at the Unitarian church preaches on his time spent in Japan and preaches of the importance of ukiyo-e or “the floating world”. Ukiyo-e is a Japanese world in which sensual pleasures are explored and encouraged. The only one who seemed intrigued by the world was little Steven who couldn’t understand his fascination with the boys playing soccer at recess yet he never truly wanted to play. Steven fell in love with a world in which he felt he belonged and was free to express himself away from the patriarchal oppression of his father. Ukiyo-e allows you to explore the “what ifs” of life and this family restricted themselves from finding themselves. They never allowed themselves to be given into pleasures. The father sought pleasures outside the strict construct the “perfect” family. The mother blamed herself for the father’s adultery and was too scared to explore her possibilities and needs. Claire saw her father’s favoritism as a disadvantage and that all her family’s problems were based on that relationship. Rebecca sought her father’s favoritism and was disheartened by his neglect; she decided to take her angst out on the world around her. They never saw the world in a different light and approached their wants and pleasures that they keep hidden. This manifests later in life to the point where the two sisters contemplate ending their life. Steven dies from his disease but is not dishearten because he can finally enter the floating world, the only place that truly accepts. The only place he can get away from what the perfect family is supposed to look like and how they are supposed to behave. Now, he can look on after his sisters and family in peace. Vogue encourages us all to realize that the perfect life we seek is within ourselves and pleasures; we must not hold back from these desires or they will erupt into something we cannot control. We will fall over the precipice of the mountain, just as the family’s car was headed for. We must breathe together and love another. We must forget social constructs and accept our own passions.
 * A Critique of //The Long Christmas Ride Home// **