The Washington Times
Performance: Washington, D.C.
21-Dec-90

While "Annie 2" long since has been buried in a landfill in New Jersey, "A Tuna Christmas" is back in the Terrace Theatre. And it shows every sign of growing into a holiday tradition.

This gently comic, Texas-style "Our Town" is a follow-up to "Greater Tuna," the satiric look at small-minded folk in the third-smallest town in the Lone Star State. It contains no sugarplum fairies or ghosts of Christmas Present – just everyday folks comically struggling to make it through the holidays.

And somehow it is reassuring to learn that others are in crisis at Christmas. Maybe Tuna has more than its share.

Stanley Bumiller, the town's one juvenile delinquent, is suspected of being the Christmas phantom, a mischievous vandal who defaces holiday decorations by night. Stanley is on probation, working off his debt to society by court-prescribed community-service with the Tuna Little Theatre's production of "A Christmas Carol."

The problem is that penny-pinching city secretary Dixie Deberry threatens to get tough with the poverty-stricken theater company. She'll pull the plug on its power if it doesn't pay its back utility bill. No power, no performance, no commuted sentence for Stanley.

And having no Tuna Little Theatre production would be devastating to Stanley's stage-struck sister Charlene. She has a crush on Joe Bob Lipsey, the "sissy" director who needs a hit to work his way back to the bright lights of Waco.

Charlene's mother, Bertha Bumiller, the bouffant-coiffed, polyester queen of Tuna, has her own dilemma with her wayward, absentee husband. So when radio station OKKK celebrity Arles Struvie gets Bertha tipsy at a Christmas party and dances with her, she starts considering a little straying herself.

It's not exactly "Peyton Place," but it's enough to keep the Tuna Smut Snatchers, a vigilante group for moral decency, busy. (President Vera Carp has just about cracked the code on Christmas carols. She is trying to ban "Silent Night" because she's not too sure about the lyric about "Round Yon Virgin.")

To me, the basic joke of provincial attitudes taken to comic extremes is sustained ably, though it might be stretched to its limits. Without a substantial new gimmick, I'm not sure the world is ready for "A Tuna July 4th."

Despite a clever script, the show has never taken its strength from writing but from the performances of co-creators Jaston Williams and Joe Sears. About two dozen characters are visible in "A Tuna Christmas," all played by this pair of chameleons.

Like its predecessor, "A Tuna Christmas" is a celebration of the live-theater experience, with a nod to the vaudeville tradition of the quick-change artist. Co-writer/direct,or Ed Howard builds various exits into the evening. For instance, Mr. Williams as Arles Struvie has cause to go off stage right only to enter stage left seconds later, transformed into Petey Fisk, spokesman for the Greater Tuna Humane Society.

Rather than fool the audience with the transformation, though, Mr. Sears and Mr. Williams wallow in the artifice. Even so, these two impressive actors have a seemingly limitless number of voices, postures and gestures.

Certainly gender is no boundary for them. Mr. Sears. the more portly of the team, is especially uncanny in his creation of older women with a no-nonsense manner about them and absolutely no fashion sense.

Making a return visit from "Greater Tuna" is Aunt Pearl Burras (Mr. Sears), as kindly as the day is long. But it's nearing Christmas, the days are short, and she is out to kill the blue jays that are threatening her hens.

Used-gun saleswoman Didi Snavely ("Weaponry that works" is her motto) sells Aunt Pearl a slingshot, and she merrily brings down her feathered nemeses.

Visually, Mr. Sears' characters are instantly comic, but the actor is so committed to inhabiting them that he eventually convinces us of their underlying truth.

Mr. Williams' style is a little more overtly manic and cartoonish, and the contrast works extremely well. His best invention is the Bumiller brood – Stanley, Charlene and Jody.

And both score with a pair of new characters, Inita Goodwin and Helen Bedd, the short-order cook and waitress of the local Tastee-Kreem drive-in.

"A Tuna Christmas" fulfills every requirement for holiday entertainment except the spiritual. Although there's philandering in the air around Tuna, certainly it manages to remain a family show that children will enjoy as much, if not more, than their parents.

I wouldn't want to spend Christmas anywhere but Tuna, Texas.