The Denver Post
Performance: Denver, CO
15-Nov-90

Once again we're back in the third smallest town in Texas with its gallery of 22 zany characters, portrayed by originators Joe Sears and Jaston Williams in a series of 142 costume changes.

It's the Christmas holidays, times are tough, and emotions are close to the surface.

Bertha Bumiller's drunken husband hasn't come home, her kids are troubled, and a Christmas Phantom is destroying yard decorations.

The Smut Snatchers of the new order have discovered obscenities in Christmas carols; town clerk Dixie Deberry (Williams) is threatening to turn out the lights on the Christmas Play because the community playhouse is behind on the light bill.

Vera Carp (Williams) in her cat's-eye glasses is as self-centered as ever. And chain-smok-ing, base-voiced, perpetually angry gun-store owner DiDi Snavely (Williams) is wooing customers to her Peace On Earth sale by warning "it's unsafe these days to ride unarmed in a one-horse sleigh." This is a town of frustrated people. And in the adept hands of Sears and Williams, the multiple stories are the stuff of biting comedy - laced with poignant moments that take one's breath away. Through their antics we come not only to know the people of Greater Tuna - some of them pretty ridiculous on the surface - but to recognize their humanity.

We might roar with laughter at housewife Bertha Bumiller (Sears) in her lime green polyester pantsuit and indestructible bouffant hairdo, but in another scene we're touched to the core by her loneliness, vulnerability and basic decency. And older son Stanley (Williams) might be a hulking former delinquent, but the affection between him and elderly bluejay-shooting Aunt Pearl (Sears) is very real.

Meanwhile radio station OKKK announcers Thurston Wheelis (Sears) and Arles Struvie (Williams) keep everybody abreast of what's going on, broadcasting from a studio with a tacky aluminum tree decorated with periodically exploding lights.

Even though it's a sequel, "A Tuna Christmas" is constructed well enough to stand on its own. There are audio problems with some of the off-stage radio sequences, and some scenes go on too long. New characters Inita Goodwin (Sears) and Helen Bedd (Williams), good-time girls who run the local Tastee Kreme, are welcome additions; Joe Bob Lipsey, the effeminate director of Tuna's Little Theater, needs sharper definition.

Does Stanley leave town for a new start? Who is the Christmas Phantom, And what happens to the romance between Arles and Bertha? It's enough to say that when the audience leaves the theater, everyone is smiling.