Simple life

A Tuna Christmas pokes fun

by Steve Vineberg

A TUNA CHRISTMAS By Jaston Williams, Joe Sears, and Ed Howard. Directed by Michael G. Dell'Orto. Set designed by Alan Yeong. Costumes by Ted Giammona. Lighting by Annmarie Duggan. With Chip Phillips and Joe Smith. At Worcester Foothills Theatre, through November 23.

Your response to A Tuna Christmas, the pre-holiday season offering at Foothills, will depend on whether you break up on a line like "She screamed like white trash at a tent meeting" or "He couldn't catch a cold in the Klondike." I'm not being disingenuous here: when I saw the show, people all around me were giggling or guffawing happily at humor that made me want to hide under my seat. So take your cue from your own reaction to the lines I've quoted, not just from my opinion, which is that A Tuna Christmas is two and a half hours of hell.

The play, a collaboration by three men (Jaston Williams, Joe Sears, and Ed Howard), is a sequel to the madly popular Greater Tuna, which began to tour the country about a decade and a half ago. Both concoctions consist of a series of vaudeville sketches built around the personalities of the citizens of small-town Tuna, Texas, all of whom -- male and female, young and old -- are portrayed by two actors. (At Foothills the performers are Chip Phillips and Joe Smith.) Greater Tuna kept returning to a pair of homegrown DJs, Arles Struvie and Thurston Wheelis. The sequel has a wider range of locales and more plot -- which means, in this case, more chances for sentimentality. One of the characters is the long-suffering wife of a mostly absent drunk who spends most of the play waiting for him to show up for Christmas with the family. (He never does, but the writers date her up, finally, with another local lonelyheart.) Another is her son, who's been in and out of trouble with the law all his life and whose Christmas present from his adoring aunt, toward the end of the play, is a one-way ticket out of Tuna so he can start a new life.

What makes these tugs at the heartstrings particularly obnoxious is that even if you buy the idea that Williams, Sears, and Howard are as fond of the women and men of Tuna as they profess to be, the humor is entirely at the Tunans' expense, and they're something slightly queasy-making about being asked to laugh at them one minute and smile adoringly at their sweet, simple little lives the next. The characters aren't just broadly drawn -- so broadly that you constantly feel you're being slammed in the skull with a two-by-four -- and we're not just cued to laugh at their foibles. What we're supposed to find uproarious are their manners and their taste -- at the kitsch that makes up their lives, like the elaborate Christmas yard displays that compete for an annual prize, or the community theatricals, or the radio ads for holiday specials at the gun store. The playwrights aren't in the same class as those unbearable Midwestern snobs, the Coen brothers, or the phony documentarian Michael Moore: A Tuna Christmas isn't downright offensive, like Fargo or Roger and Me. But its condescension is unpleasant.

Do the two actors, Chip Phillips and Joe Smith, pull it off? Well, they move in and out of a lot of different costumes (designed by Ted Giammona) with remarkable speed, and they try out a lot of different voices, and they seem to be having a great old time. They're certainly spirited, and they're certainly not bad, and if some of their caricatures are less successful than others, they get to try out so many (almost two dozen) that it's no disgrace if the quality isn't consistent. The problem isn't theirs, really; it's that an entire evening of mimicry isn't satisfying -- to me, at least -- unless the material gets beneath the surface, which isn't the same thing as turning mushy. Lily Tomlin is the queen of this kind of stand-up, but her characters have souls. Smith and Phillips couldn't locate the souls in the people of Tuna if they spent all year excavating for them, because Williams, Sears, and Howard didn't provide any. A Tuna Christmas is store-window theater: you get exactly what you see.