THE LONGER CHRISTMAS DINNER

In Wilder’s meditation on time,
the actors have to do the heavy lifting

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“Only time, only the passing of time can help…”

TUTA Theatre’s remounting of Thornton Wilder’s The Long Christmas Dinner opens with Keith Parham’s handsome set featuring an upper-middle-class dining room in the first half of the twentieth century — all polished red wood, luxe cushions, and a few discreet, tasteful Christmas decorations. A single place setting is on the table. Flanking the table are two becurtained doorways that will take on enormous significance through the play. As we settle in, two cast members engage in some japery involving the tuning of an instrument and vocal exercises before bursting into (deliberately) excessively melismatic Christmas song. Cue appropriate laughter from the audience. Then the onstage music ends and, with a glorious burst of movement, the entire cast, all clad in off-white linen, bounds onto the stage, place setting — literally and figuratively — for the first scene of the play.

Huy Nguyen, Aziza Macklin, Alexis Primus

The Long Christmas Dinner is one of Wilder’s earlier plays, published a few years after he won his Literature Pulitzer for The Bridge of San Luis Rey, and seven years before he won the first of his two Drama Pulitzers for Our Town (such an underachiever was our Thornton). In many ways, The Long Christmas Dinner can be seen as a forerunner to that latter masterpiece, both in terms of its experimentation with structure as well as its themes.

Clifton Frei, Alexis Primus, Bide Akande

Beginning in the 1930s, the play follows the lives of the Bayard family through multiple generations, spanning almost a century. The central conceit is that we only see them at their Christmas dinner. The dinners are presented without interruption, so we jump forward through the year(s) without warning. It takes some getting used to at first, although Wain Parham’s music design provides musical cues that help improve the flow of incident. This time-jumping is both the most interesting thing about the play as well as its unredeemable flaw (more on that later).

Clifton Frei, Joan Merlo, Alexis Primus

We meet a newlywed Roderick (Clifton Frei) and Lucia Bayard (Alexis Primus), along with Roderick’s mother (Joan Merlo), sitting down to their first Christmas dinner in their new house. A beloved cousin (a boisterous and altogether lovable Bide Akande) soon joins them and our first iteration of the Bayard family Christmas dinner is complete. Soon we skip to the next year when the first child is born, then the second, and so on.

Bide Akande, Clifton Frei, Alexis Primus

By presenting several individual dinners as one uninterrupted event, Wilder gives us a fascinating and rarely seen look at lives where the primary focus is not on the individual characters, but the passage of time. It allows us a temporal bird’s-eye view, so to speak. As the years go by, children grow up and leave, fortunes increase, patterns repeat (alcoholism, in this case), and unforeseeable external events intrude and disrupt. Dialogue repeats, as do costume motifs — Rachel Sypniewski’s costume design is remarkably clever and elegant, using a few vivid pieces over the linen base to specify characters through the generations. And then there’s death; the one constant, expected or not.

Bide Akande, Alexis Primus, Clifton Frei

But if the concept is intriguing, it’s also hell on the actors. The scenes are very short. With no interstices, the actors have to rapidly adjust in seconds, and as talented as this cast is, not all of them manage to pull it off — although it must be stated that everyone is wonderful in at least one character/iteration of their character, most often in the older versions.

The two most successful performances come from the actors on the periphery of the family: Joan Merlo as Mother Bayard — and later as Cousin Ermengarde — gives a lovely, warm performance in both instances; and Charlie Irving, as Genevieve, the younger daughter of Roderick and Lucia, is excellent throughout, especially remarkable given that for almost the entire second chunk of the play she is placed front and center, facing the audience, with no respite during the character shifts. In spite of this — or maybe because of it — her aging is far more effective, subtly conveyed more in attitude and inflection rather than any physical or vocal tics (Merlo takes the same tack as Cousin Ermengarde). It made me wonder if that might not be a more fruitful approach to the performances of the other characters as well.

Joan Merlo

The brevity of the scenes and the high concept also stymie the pacing of the show. Director Jacqueline Stone tries to keep things moving, but the show still lurches quite a bit — especially in the first half. There are two added musical numbers: the first, an attempt to introduce a musical motif (“Ain’t No Mountain High Enough”) to the first relationship, doesn’t quite click; and the second, a duet version of Stevie Wonder’s “As,” performed by two characters on either side of the veil separating life and death, while gorgeously sung and beautiful in isolation, stops the show cold. In fact, there seems to be quite a bit of padding in general; at 85 minutes the show is more than twice the length of the original one-act. I understand the impulse to give the audience its money’s worth, but this might be a play best presented as part of a program of multiple one-act plays rather than on its own.

Huy Nguyen, Charlie Irving, Aziza Macklin

This review reads much harsher than it is intended to be. These are complex, well-sketched-out characters, performed by a superbly talented cast, and even at their weakest points, the actors do a fine job. The flaw is not theirs but the script’s. And despite the issues with the construction, the play is frequently moving — and occasionally, powerfully so (not for nothing is Wilder considered one of the greatest American playwrights).

Joan Merlo

With Tom & Eliza, TUTA was responsible for one of my favorite nights at the theatre this year, performed in one of the humblest spaces that I’ve been in. They are a small company (as they frequently remind us), but size doesn’t matter (stop snickering!) — not when the quality of talent at every level is this high.

The Long Christmas Dinner may fall just short of TUTA’s own standards, but it’s still a fine, thought-provoking piece of theatre and a welcome antidote to the schmaltz of the season.

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photos by Logan and Candice Lee Conner, Oomphotography

The Long Christmas Dinner
TUTA Theatre
Bramble Arts Loft, 5545 N. Clark St.
ends on December 28, 2025
for tickets, visit TUTA

for more shows, visit Theatre in Chicago

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