(Above: Tom Laird, Elizabeth Grieve, Allen Hambrick, and Steve Mandell portray members spanning 90 years of the Bayard family in The Long Christmas Dinner at The Very Little Theatre)
By Randi Bjornstad
It’s not really a musical, but when the Very Little Theatre presents A Long Christmas Dinner, there nonetheless will be a substantial amount of caroling by actors and audience, accompanied by live music.
The play by three-time Pulitzer Prize winner Thornton Wilder — he won for The Bridge of San Luis Rey, Our Town, and The Skin of Our Teeth — will be in Stage Left, the VLT’s smaller performance area, as the company continues its 90th season.
The concept of the play is a visit to the Bayard family, and that means meeting them as they gather for Christmas dinners that span the 90 years from 1865 to 1955, with characters from different generations showing what changes and what becomes part of a family’s bedrock as time goes by.
Wilder wrote the play in 1931, when the Very Little Theatre was in only its third season. The play had its debut in a joint production by the Yale Dramatic Association and the Vassar Philaletheis Society.
The concept of the generations-spanning dinner apparently and unintentionally inspired a famous scene in actor-director Orson Welles’ movie, Citizen Kane, generally considered his masterpiece.
Welles wanted to portray the gradual disintegration of the title character’s marriage and came up with the idea of showing the couple at the breakfast table, without scene changes, as they passed through a decade of increasing unhappiness.
At some point, Welles realized he had been influenced subliminally by Wilder’s play and explained himself in an interview with filmmaker Peter Bogdanovich, saying he had “stolen the idea from The Long Christmas Dinner of Thornton Wilder!
“I did the breakfast scene thinking I’d invented it. It wasn’t in the script originally,” Welles reportedly said. “And when I was almost finished with it, I suddenly realized that I’d unconsciously stolen it from Thornton and I called him up and admitted to it.”
Asked by Bogdanovich how Wilder responded, Welles said he “was pleased” and that the two were good friends.
The Long Christmas Dinner is a one-act play with no intermission, directed by Rebecca Lowe, who introduced the concept of the caroling in order to provide cohesion for the characters as well as involve the audience
“I felt that by giving the Bayard family traditional Christmas songs to sing together, it becomes a special little jewel that audiences can cherish as part of their own holiday experience,” Lowe said in introducing the play.
The cast includes Elizabeth Grieve, Steve Mandell, Mary Keating, Tom Laird, Allen Hambrick, Sarah Nessin, Christina Scott, Sharon Wetterling, Steven Shipman, Phoebe Gildea, Matt Arscott, and Marcee Long.
The show will be performed 11 times, from Nov. 30 through Dec. 16.
The Long Christmas Dinner
When: Evenings at 7:30 p.m. on Nov. 30, Dec. 1, 6-8 and 13-15; matinees at 2 p.m. on Dec. 2, 9 and 16
Where: The Very Little Theatre, 2350 Hilyard St., Eugene
Tickets: $15 general admission, available at the box office, 541-344-7751, from 1:30 p.m. to 5:30 p.m. Wednesday through Saturday or online at TheVLT.com
