December 11-17, 2003

theater

Santaland Diaries and Season's Greetings

Along with "Chekhov Mania" and a children’s show, ’Twas the Night Before Christmas and Glenn Russell’s Mistero Buffo, the Triangle offers a third holiday show, the nasty twin monologues by David Sedaris. These are very funny, mean-spirited and bizarre pieces, but this production misses the tone by a mile.

In the first, a man (Tony Hamilton) tells us about working as an elf at Santaland at Macy's in New York. This vicious indictment of miserable children, their awful parents and the whole horror of the holiday season becomes a squishy, pathos-filled narrative in Hamilton's ultra-gay, uptalking, smiley-face delivery.

In the second, a woman (Tina Brock) tells us all the news of the Dunbar family's past year, as though she were a talking Christmas letter. An upsetting year by any standard (newly discovered daughter who is a Vietnamese hooker, crack-baby grandchild killed in the clothes washer), the delivery should be prissy-sweet and small-town righteous (with a whiff of the sociopath) in shocking contrast to the violent content, but once again the production mistakes the tone and gives us instead a woman who seems merely ordinary and unpleasant (not to mention that her table full of craft supplies remains frustratingly unused).

Not much holiday cheer here.

SANTALAND DIARIES and SEASON’S GREETINGS

Through Dec. 27, Random Acts of Theater at the Triangle, 1220 N. Lawrence St., 215-763-0110.

—Toby Zinman

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