...while the men watch football in the den.
Ruby Christmas at Planet Earth Theatre
*1/2 (out of *****)
Mark S.P. Turvin
(w) 965-1021  (h) 894-5443
I can be reached for comment via e-mail at: mspt@asu.edu

	It's the holiday season. That means it's time for plays full 
of holiday cheer. Don't let the title fool you, though; this play 
has as much to do with Christmas as General Hospital has to do 
with the medical profession. Sarah Dreher's Ruby Christmas is a 
view of the machinations of the matriarchical side of an affluent 
Pennsylvania town during the Christmas season. This plotty little 
show plays like like one of those forgettable 1950's parlor 
dramas, with the twist being the prodigal son's return for a 
combination Christmas and Fortieth Wedding Anniversary being 
replaced by the lesbian daughter's return, with girlfriend in tow.
 	Besides this turn, integral to the structure of this 
claustrophobic show is the noticeable lack of male characters in 
the cast. This starts out to be a play about women's 
relationships: mother and daughter, best friends, confidants, 
lovers, and all the stops in between. The only male representation 
in the show is the enormous portrait of the patriarch of the 
family center stage and the occasional sound of videotaped 
football games from the den where the men are.
 	That's fine. Men need not be central to a show, especially 
one about a mother dealing with a daughter's sexual tendancies. 
But without a single male member in the cast, the show is almost 
completely overwhelmed with the male presence. It's ironic when 
those offstage steal the show. Somewhere along the way, this play 
about a mother and a daughter who are too much alike to be close 
becomes more about a mother and a daughter trying to deal with the 
offstage father and son. When half your motivation and plot is too 
busy watching football to appear, it makes for boring, talky and 
drawn out theatre.
 	Marian Levine's soap opera-like direction doesn't help move 
this misguided show anywhere. There are seven women trying to deal 
with too many relationships and remember too many people, both 
seen and unseen, to make for much real action. Actresses in the 
show kept flubbing their lines and referring to the wrong people, 
making the confusing script that much more difficult to keep up 
with. A family tree in the program may have helped with this 
confusion, just as something more than a soap opera plot in the 
script would have helped keep the audiences attention.
	To make a dreary evening even more dreadful, the level of the 
performances rivaled the misguided and uninspired script. Only one 
of the seven actresses, Donna Holmes Baudoin's portrayal of 
Kelley, the daughter's girlfriend, was anything more than a half-
hearted script reading. The most climactic scene of the evening, 
the last of the many mother/daughter confrontations, played as 
turgidly as a congressional fillibuster. Maggie Wade's mother and 
Cheryl Booth's daughter telegraphed the rising action and 
stairstepped their emotions in the most painful of ways. By the 
time of the inevitable slap, the most physical action of the 
evening, the audience could have written a fair approximation to 
the finale of the scene by themselves. Some of them might even 
have done a better job of it, too.
	Lisa Newman's box set design was good for the space, as she 
recreated the living room of the suburban home in a most realistic 
way. Jonathon Cooper's lighting design was also adequate, but 
neither set nor lights could make up for the disappointment of the 
evening's production.
	The intentions of the playwright, director and cast were in 
the right place. A piece of this type would be interesting, and is 
definitely needed these days. Somehow, though, this play fell 
apart a quarter of the way through. It's one of the few times 
where what was happening in the offstage den was probably more 
interesting to watch than what was onstage in the living room. 

Production Details:
Ruby Christmas by Sarah Dreher
Planet Earth Theatre, Phoenix
241-1828
December 1-December 23, 1995

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