Leave the staid “Nutcracker” and “A Christmas Carol” to the stuffy audiences on Broadway. In Hudson County, theatergoers want to laugh during the holidays – and for the past four seasons Jersey City’s J City Theater has obliged with its annual production of “A Tuna Christmas,” a satirical look at life in a small southern town.
“This is our fifth year doing ‘A Tuna Christmas,’ ” said J City’s Executive Producer Clay Cockrell. “Our audiences are ‘Tuna’ nuts. They ask about it all year long. They sometimes know the lines before we say them onstage. We even have people who want to know the production dates way in advance because they’ll plan their other Christmas events around attending ‘A Tuna Christmas.’ ”
The play, which opened on Wednesday, Dec. 7, will close out J City Theater’s 2011 season on Saturday, Dec. 17.
Small town satire
Described as a “marathon” holiday comedy, the play takes place in the fictitious small town of Tuna, Texas, during the annual Christmas decoration contest, won several years in a row by the snobby Vera Carp. Despite everyone’s best efforts, several events and subplots threaten to upend the contest and Christmas in Tuna.
There are problems with the town’s annual production of “A Christmas Carol.” One character on probation is just itching to leave town. And there’s a mysterious phantom vandal on the loose who’s going around destroying Christmas yard displays ahead of the decorating contest.
‘Our audiences are ‘Tuna’ nuts. They ask about it all year long.’ – Clay Cockrell
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The play – part of a series of scripts written by Jaston Williams, Joe Sears, and Ed Howard – consists of two actors who play 22 separate characters. So, expect lots of costume changes.
“That’s part of the comedy,” said Cockrell, one of the actors who plays half the characters in the show. “You’ll have an actor walk offstage in full costume as one character and, in a mater of seconds, he comes back onstage in a completely different costume and as a different character.”
(J City Theater, said Cockrell, has only produced “A Tuna Christmas,” and has never performed the other shows in the Tuna series – “Greener Tuna,” “Red, White, and Tuna,” and “Tuna Does Vegas.”)
While Cockrell has always played 11 of the show’s 22 characters each year that J City Theater has produced “A Tuna Christmas,” this year, for the first time, actor Ron Nummi will perform the remaining 11 characters. Nummi was last seen in J City’s production of David Mamet’s play “Race.”
A fun departure
For those unfamiliar with J City, “Tuna” is a departure from the typical plays produced by the theater. Cockrell and his wife Sandy Cockrell, who directs all of J City’s productions, are known for the weighty dramas they select for the rest of their season. Mark St. Germain’s “The God Committee,” “Compression of a Casualty,” and the Pulitzer Prize-winning play “State of the Union” are more indicative of the types of shows audiences can expect from the Cockrells.
“Generally, we want to do shows that have been performed on Broadway, that have won awards, that inspire us, and challenge us,” said Clay Cockrell. “Christmas is the one time of year that we get to be silly and have some fun. Since a lot of other theaters will do things like ‘A Christmas Carol,’ we decided our holiday tradition would be something different – different for us, and different from what other theaters are doing at this time of the year.”
J City productions are performed inside St. Michaels’ Church, in Jersey City’s Hamilton Park area, at 252 Ninth St. “A Tuna Christmas” runs through Saturday, Dec. 17, with shows performed Wednesdays through Saturdays. All tickets are $20 and can be purchased through www.BrownPaperTickets.com. For the Thursday evening shows of Dec. 8 and 15 patrons can buy two tickets for the discounted rate of $30.
For more information on “A Tuna Christmas” and J City Theater, visit www.jcity.org.
E-mail E. Assata Wright at awright@hudsonreporter.com.