TUTA Theatre’s Latest Production Follows One Family Over 90 Years Of Christmas Dinners

ANDERSONVILLE — TUTA Theatre will guide an audience through more than 90 years worth of one family’s winter holidays through its production of Thornton Wilder’s “The Long Christmas Dinner.”

The production runs through Dec. 29 at the Bramble Arts Loft’s Beatrice Theatre, 5545 N. Clark St. There is a special opening night gala performance on Saturday, followed by festive food and drink.

The experimental theater company based out of Ravenswood Manor at 4670 N. Manor Ave. has presented unique productions that challenge audiences over its more-than-20-year history.

“We’ve never done a holiday show. We’ve never considered doing one because it never felt like it necessarily aligned with our aesthetic and our values, per se,” said TUTA’s co-artistic director Jacqueline Stone, who directed the play. 

That changed after Stone read Wilder’s play, which follows several generations of the Bayard family as they celebrate almost a century’s worth of Christmas dinners.

“Of all my plays it is the one that has found the widest variety of receptions. At some performances it has been played to constant laughter; some listeners are deeply moved and shaken by it; some find it cruel and cynical (“What? The dead are forgotten so soon?”),” wrote Wilder in a 1960 letter about his work.

Wilder published the “The Long Christmas Dinner” in 1931 when he was splitting his time between personal projects and teaching creative writing at the University of Chicago. Wilder won three Pulitzer Prizes over the course of his career, including one for his most famous work, the 1938 play “Our Town.”

“It wasn’t like any holiday show I had read before, because it’s much less about the holiday itself. It’s about the relationships and the people that inhabit the holiday that are the most important to the story,” Stone said. 

The play’s primary setting is the Bayards’ dining room. During the play’s runtime, the audience witnesses time’s arrow move forward as the family celebrates births, mourns the passing of loved ones and welcomes new people to the family. 

“The primary way that we see things change is actually through the performances of the actors. They’ve got a really challenging task in that they have to age in front of us, for the duration of their life. And it moves quickly, some characters live longer than others,” Stone said.

One character first appears as an infant and remains in the dining room setting until passing away in his 60s, she said. 

“Once someone steps into the play or is introduced as a character, they never exit until they’re gone one way or the other,” Stone said.  

While the Bayard family ages in front of the audience’s eyes, their home also undergoes changes to show the passage of time, Stone said.

“There are things that get brought into the house and leave the space, depending on who is living there at the time,” she said. “Thornton Wilder is such a brilliant writer, that part of how we really understand time passing is through the idea of repetition.”

Each new epoch of the Bayard family’s storied dining room, which serves as a liminal space, is inevitably tied to the one that came before. 

For example, the line is ”Every last twig is wrapped around with ice. You almost never see that” is repeated by three different characters who make the observation across different years that that audience is shown. 

“There’s also the cycle of rituals or traditions that get passed down over generations,” Stone said. “We see certain cycles repeating, and it’s because it was passed down. We watch as it’s been passed down over the generations.”

The audience witnesses the genesis of a tradition and in later years hear the story of how it started. As each new generation celebrates the holiday, the reason for particular rituals fade away from living memory until they’re forgotten, ignored or made fun of, she said. 

“People don’t carry them on. Some of them are made fun of by younger generations who say, ‘Can you believe this story? It can’t even possibly be true,’” Stone said. 

Repetition is also seen in the Bayard family’s personalities and other behaviors. Some family members swear they’ll never be like a particular relative, but as the play’s timeline moves forward they start echoing behaviors of older members, she said. 

“They’re repeating certain cycles. Some are positive and are sometimes destructive. It’s an interesting thing to get to observe, because we watch those 90 years in 90 minutes,” she said.

TUTA Theatre’s production will run through Dec. 29 at the Bramble Arts Loft’s Beatrice Theatre, 5545 N. Clark St. Pay-what-you-choose general admission tickets are $20, $45 and $60, and the gala performance on Saturday is $100. The theater’s website states “By choosing a higher ticket price, you are creating opportunities for others to attend at lower prices that may not be able to enjoy this performance otherwise.”

To purchase tickets and for additional information about the production and the nonprofit theatre company, visit tutatheatre.org.

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