Season's Greetings
Reviews

T.H. McCULLOH, Los Angeles Times

Critic’s Pick

If you like your comedy more sophisticated and thematically cohesive, "Season's Greetings," by prolific British playwright Alan Ayckbourn, will ring your Christmas chimes.

Sly, subtle and smartly executed, the production marks the Company Rep's last offering at the El Portal's Circle Theatre before the company's move to the nearby American Renegade Theatre.

The action takes place in the home of Neville Bunker (Daniel Sapecky) and his wife, Belinda (Heather Simmons), who are hosting a full house of relatives and friends over the holidays.

As realized by Ron Slanina, the warm, handsomely decked-out set is ideal for a cozy, old-fashioned Christmas. However, in typical Ayckbourn fashion, the characters soon prove so boozy, over-sexed and generally fractious that the holidays degenerate into a series of increasingly outlandish calamities.

Director Jules Aaron renders Ayckbourn's deliciously dour portrait with a fine hand. It's hard to single out anyone in this uniformly top-notch cast, but Simmons and Slanina strike sparks as would-be adulterers whose dalliance is spectacularly disrupted, while Stuart Thompson shines as a boorish old poop whose epic puppet shows are the bane of everyone's holiday.

Christmas not very merry for this miserable collection

By Julio Martinez

Prolific British playwright Alan Ayckbourn is renowned for his clever, complicated plots that often utilize multiple settings and simultaneous realities. Penned in 1980, his holiday farce "Season's Greetings' is one of his more linear efforts, chronicling the monumentally chaotic holiday gathering of nine family members and friends, whose social machinations give new meaning to the word dysfunctional. It is definitely one of his lesser works.

The NoHo-based Company Rep, under the capable direction of Jules Aaron, instills as much humanity as possible into these dislikable folk but cannot overcome the playwright's failure to justify why an audience should spend any time at all at the mean-spirited festivities being held in the home of Neville and Belinda Bunker (played by Daniel Sapecky and Heather Simmons).

Family gatherings are notorious for the tensions and misunderstandings they can generate, but this Christmas only serves to underscore the deep flaws inherent in each of the attendees. Benignly self-absorbed Neville thoroughly ignores his ever-seething wife, Belinda, as she oversees every aspect of the Christmas Eve preparations. Neville's under-achieving friend Eddie (Doug Kaback) would rather read comics than attend to the needs of his pregnant, long-suffering wife, Patty (Lydia Lee Belvin), and three children. Uncle Bernard (Stuart Thompson), who is as ineffectual a physician as he is an amateur puppeteer, is pathetically attempting to run interference for his ever-soused wife, Phyllis (Melanie Ewbank), as she careens through Belinda's kitchen in her annual effort to cook Christmas Eve dinner.

In the parlor, misanthropic Uncle Harvey (Shelly Kurtz) is glued to the TV, proclaiming proudly that he has given each of his nephews and nieces guns for Christmas. Meanwhile, Belinda's sexually repressed sister, Rachel (Nicola Francis), is bitterly resigned to the fact her visiting gentleman friend, Clive (Ron Slanina), is more attracted to hot-eyed Belinda than to her.

Director Aaron keeps the action moving swiftly as the Bunker household slapsticks its way through three days of holiday angst. Simmons exudes the self-controlled frustration of a neglected wife whose passions finally explode in wanton lust for her sister's beau. For his part, Slanina's Clive effectively communicates the discomfort of a stranger in a strange land who wants nothing more than to be cordial and accommodating to whomever's needs are in demand. And Belvin is comically appealing as the production's most likable character, the ever-pregnant Patty.

"Season's Greetings' is the final Company Rep production at the Circle Theatre at the El Portal. In January, the company will produce Tennessee Williams' "Camino Real' at its new home, the American Renegade Theatre, a couple of blocks down on Lankershim Boulevard.