To Grandmother's House We Go (With Baggage)
By BEN BRANTLEY

When theatergoers talk about a play as a religious experience, they usually just mean that it had charismatic performances or some exciting dance numbers. It's like fashion editors using divine to describe a nice sweater. But in "The Long Christmas Ride Home," which opened last night at the Vineyard Theater, Paula Vogel is not indulging in such hyperbole. She means her play to be a religious experience in the way that a Christmas Mass might be for committed Roman Catholics: an exalted communal ritual of redemption and solace. And darned if this creatively questing playwright — helped by what may well be the most visually exquisite production of the season — doesn't at least partly succeed.

Sara Krulwich/The New York Times A bumpy journey with puppets: from left, Mark Blum, Enid Graham (obscured), Will McCormack, Catherine Kellner and Randy Graff in "Ride."

On the page the dialogue in Ms. Vogel's latest offering doesn't exactly inspire hosannas. The characters don't begin to approach the complexity and vividness of those in her "Baltimore Waltz" and the Pulitzer Prize-winning "How I Learned To Drive." (It seems appropriate that the most affecting cast members are puppets.) Besides, who wants to sit through another story about unhappily married parents whose emotionally mauled children grow up to be losers in love?

But it's not so much the tale as the telling that counts here. Ms. Vogel has said that with "Ride" she was trying to create a latter-day answer to Thornton Wilder's "Our Town," with its archetypal small-town lives drawn on a cosmic canvas. And it's those echoes of eternity, and the ravishingly stylized ways in which they are represented, that turns "Ride" into a shiver-making experience.

Like Wilder, Ms. Vogel is enamored of the formal, symbol-dominated narratives of traditional Japanese drama. For "Ride" she has enlisted the techniques of bunraku puppetry and Noh theater, among others, to find the poetry within the clichés of one typically dysfunctional family.

She certainly couldn't have hoped for a better team of accomplices in achieving this goal. Demonstrating that sensitivity and showmanship are not mutually exclusive, the director Mark Brokaw, Ms. Vogel's collaborator on "Drive," has assembled a team of appropriately poetic technical artists that includes Basil Twist, the remarkable puppet maker who created "Symphonie Fantastique," the aquatic spectacle set to Berlioz.

I saw an earlier version of "Ride" in June from the Trinity Repertory in Providence, R.I., directed by Oskar Eustis and also featuring puppets by Mr. Twist. It was a fine production, but it didn't begin to prepare me for the delicate visual feast the play has become.

Mr. Twist and the set designer Neil Patel — invaluably assisted by the lighting of Mark McCullough and the projections of Jan Hartley — have further rarefied the look of "Ride" to the point that it truly seems to summon the atmosphere of the play's talismanic word: "ukiyo-e," Japanese for "the floating world."

Within this ethereal context, a very earthbound story unscrolls. The play is framed by an account of one disastrous Christmas in the 1950's, when a family of five piles into a Rambler for a claustrophobic journey to grandmother's house that no one much wants to take. The script wanders into the minds of the car's restless inhabitants as they nurse grievances and self-blame while grimly anticipating the festivities.

The internal monologues and overarching narrative are spoken by the performers dressed up, in Jess Goldstein's Eisenhower-era costumes, as Mom and Dad, the excellent Randy Graff and Mark Blum. The three children — two girls and one girlish boy — are embodied by not quite life-sized puppets. They are manipulated by the ensemble members, who will later portray the children as grown-ups (Enid Graham, Catherine Kellner and Will McCormack).

This emotionally overstuffed car, where anxieties pervade like the fog of stale cigarette smoke, is the taking-off point for a series of time-scrambling detours. These include a visit to the Unitarian service the family attends on Christmas Eve, at which a painfully hip young minister (Sean Palmer) incongruously introduces his congregation to ancient Japanese art and philosophy.

There is also a rather shrill series of flash-forwards that discover the children, each at the end of an unhappy love affair, in their miserable adulthoods. In the last of these, the son, Stephen (Mr. McCormack), quite literally courts the specter of death.

The language in which all this is conveyed is as polarized as any I've heard in recent theater, divided between sumptuously simple lyricism and grating psychological platitudes. At their best, the narrative sections achieve the cadenced repetitions of a formal litany, a dramatic answer to the patterning of obsessive thoughts.

The same quality, enhanced to the point of transcendence, comes through in the nonverbal elements — from the angry mutating shadow figures who embody the siblings' lovers to the erotic dance of resurrection, performed against a wall of scarlet silk by Mr. McCormack and the versatile Mr. Palmer. The image of the ashen-faced puppet children, eternally frozen in their guilt and resentment, becomes a poignant metaphor for the inescapable nightmare of unhappy memories.

David Van Tieghem's chime-inflected music, performed by Luke Notary, is a seamless yet quirky fusion of Eastern and Western strains, and it reflects a priceless observation Ms. Vogel recently made about the study of exotic cultures: "Understanding leads to diplomacy and scholarship; misunderstanding leads to art."

The processions of floating kimonos, kites and lanterns that punctuate the production are welcome reminders that deeply affecting spectacle can be achieved without flashy technology. The most stirring moments of all involve nothing more than the performers' taking and releasing deep breaths.

In the play's most eloquent passage, Ms. Vogel lets Stephen explain the significance of such breathing, and it has to do with death as well as life. This is also the moment in which the play most closely links the theater with the church. It's enough to make even die-hard agnostics believe, at least for an instant, in the mystical powers of drama.

THE LONG CHRISTMAS RIDE HOME

By Paula Vogel; directed by Mark Brokaw; sets by Neil Patel; costumes by Jess Goldstein; lighting by Mark McCullough; original music and sound by David Van Tieghem; projection by Jan Hartley; choreography by John Carrafa; puppetry by Basil Twist; production managers, Kai Brothers and Bridget Markov; production stage manager, Michael McGoff; director of production, Reed Ridgley; general manager, Rebecca Habel. Presented by the Vineyard Theater, Douglas Aibel, artistic director; Bardo S. Ramírez, managing director. At 108 East 15th Street, East Village.

WITH: Mark Blum (Narrator/Man), Randy Graff (Narrator/Woman), Sean Palmer (Minister/Dancer), Catherine Kellner (Rebecca), Enid Graham (Claire); Will McCormack (Stephen); Matthew Acheson, Oliver Dalzell, Erin K. Orr, Marc Petrosino, Sarah Provost and Lake Simons (puppeteers) and Luke Notary (musician).

The New York Times
Diciembre - 2003