The other year I agreed to be the outside respondent for the theater department’s post-production analysis of “Wonder of the World”. It was a difficult play, profoundly modern and complex. I assumed that even seasoned theater hands like you could use some help with it. I felt I had something to contribute: ideas about the culture, about modernism, even about philosophy. But as the outside respondent for “A Tuna Christmas”, the play under analysis today, I am more at a loss. I don’t know that I have any special insights or that you need any special help with the play. At the play, I kept feeling that it was a loving but brutal critique of Southern, small town, conservative, low-minded, spiritually lost people. I read some critiques, hoping to find a different take, assuming that I was missing important levels or ideas. Apparently, others responded to the play as I did.
I said “brutal but loving”, and both aspects are important. Let me start with the brutal part, then get to the loving part. Consider these people, their lives, the shape of their lives, or rather the lack of shape of their lives, in light of the following list of topics that are dealt with or at least mentioned in the play: prison, reform school, probation, drunkenness, men at bars, smoking, oxygen tent, obesity, theft, wheelchair, glass eye, military school, rampant infidelity, divorce, shooting husbands, poison, brain damage, unpaid bills, GED, bad habits, children out of control, parents who can’t, Jell-O mold, watching bad TV, trailers, violence, betrayal, manipulation, racism, sexism, xenophobia, jingoistic patriotism, homophobia, KKK, UFOs, taxidermy, hairdressing, gossip, holier-than-thou religion, backstabbing--and frankly this list could go on a lot longer. These people are, to a one, sad, pathetic, broken, lonely, misguided souls. Here is a weird town, with weird people, weird pets, and weird traditions. These are “little people” in more than one sense.
They are often mean-spirited. They are painfully competitive, engaging in constant put-downs and one-upsmanship. They can be funny, but even their intended humor is typically edgy and biting, often employing exaggeration for effect, typical of a kind of Southern humor. You know the exaggerated comparisons: as useless as ice trays in Hell, deader than a bitten flea on a road-killed dog eaten by vultures. Or, the exaggerated claims: “she could track a flea across concrete”, “your stupidity could stop a tank cold a mile away”. We won’t even mention the unintentional humor, such as the unintended instances of double entendre, “We’ll hold your organ for you”, “OKKK”, or the ironic humor of white trash putting down other white trash for, well, being white trash.
They have so little to their lives--so little that is truly worthy, dependable and constructive--that they fall easily into various psychological strategies for coping, mostly destructive. They are quick to adopt an “us versus them” mentality that builds up their tattered self-esteem by tearing down others. They are quick to distrust, to be suspicious, to blame others for their own problems and failures, to blame the victim, to misinterpret in a self-serving way, to think more highly of themselves than they deserve.
They long for and clearly need community, but they have no idea how to build and maintain real community, leaving them with no community or a pale facsimile of it. Their marriages are broken, their families are dysfunctional, their religion is mean, their friendships are manipulative, their town is divided. Yet they continue on, following the same patterns of life and self, the same destructive patterns that got them into this mess, as if there were no way out or as if doing the same wrong thing will somehow in the end yield different results. And on the one day in their pseudo-Christian lives on which they should manage to put their petty little lives and problems behind them and find a new community in and through Christmas, they end up spreading misery more than community.
They often dislike their relationships, hate their jobs, and find little meaning in anything. Their lives are absurd, mirrored by the absurd events around them (UFOs appearing to RR, hostile sheep that stampede a half-coyote). Wives are domineering, husbands are worthless, children are disobedient, officials are petty, young women are ditsy, old people are demented. They have low values, low aims in life; their lives are going nowhere. They are uncouth, loud, insulting, callous, cheap, spiteful, low class. They are low people, beaten even lower in part by their own lowness and in part by life. They are caricatures, of course, but perhaps not so far from real people as one might hope.
Still, as brutal as they are and as their lives are, they are also sympathetic characters. They are quirky yet somehow lovable, irascible yet often good-natured underneath, like an edgier version of The Beverly Hillbillies. They have a sense that Christmas is about community and love and inclusion, and in their own inadequate ways, they try to achieve those goals. They spend far too much time putting on personas to impress themselves or to impress other people, yet they manage in the end to be true to themselves. If they are shallow, simple, and overly dramatic, they are authentic in their own way. You know what you are going to get with them. Some of them realize that their lives and town provide little in the way of goodness and potential, and they realize that only going elsewhere, literally or metaphorically, will help. Aunt Pearl goes out of her way to help Stanley leave town. Beertha and Arles find a moment of connection at the end in an unusual place. Petey seems to have a genuine liking for animals. Joe Bob tries to bring artistic life to a decidedly non-artistic town. Helen wouldn’t dream of shooting Joe Bob (even if her boyfriend would love to shoot a black gay artist). Even the “Christmas phantom” offers at least a hint of divine justice and humor. Then, out of the blue, a character can look at a star, see it for what it really is (a rarity in this play), as light from long ago, and find enough transcendence and connection to Divinity to be “looking into eternity”.
Put aside the characters, and consider the play. Is there a story here, a unified story, or just a series of vignettes, connected by the characters in the town? The play, through its broken and fragmented structure, mirrors and augments the fragmented lives and relationships of its characters. It didn’t have to start where it starts, and it doesn’t have to end where it ends. Nor do any of the events or scenes need to be there. They are thrown together, tossed together like a strangely created salad.
The play was created by two small-town Southern actors needing a successful show that they could be in, but it is too easy to write the play off with that point. Instead notice something inspiring about their work. They took the lemons around them culturally and made dramatic lemonade, and that is a crucial lesson for anyone interested in being an artist. The fodder for your art, whether visual, music, drama, poetry, is all around you. You don’t need to be in New York, you don’t need to be in a thriving cultural environment, you do not need even to be living a life you like. You just need to be able to see the artistic potential of what is all around you, the stuff of your life and of the lives of your fellows. In a recent talk, the poet laureate of North Carolina, Cathy Smith Bowers, spoke of how she came to see poetry as a way of dealing with the pain of her life, such as her father’s abandonment of their family. I suspect that that impulse was a driving one for the playwrights of “A Tuna Christmas”.
Questions: 1) are there different but authentic ways of portraying the positive and negative elements in this play? For example, could it be played less farcically, allowing the unintentional humor and irony to get the laughs? 2) What have you learned about using ordinary life to generate art? 3) Do we have (or tolerate) sustained satires of any region other than the South? It is acceptable because it is written by Southerners?