Theater Review - Days of whine and turkey

It’s the time of year when people announce, “It’s that time of year again.” From mid-November through New Year’s, playhouses from coast to coast surrender — almost unconditionally — to holiday-themed plays in anticipation of Christmas. It can be dispiriting to see the same shows produced year in, year out, but it helps to think of them more as part of family traditions in the audience than as attempts to advance the art of stagecraft.

You’d think that the Christian-informed troupe Art Within would be on Christmas like nutmeg on eggnog. Instead, this season they’re serving Over the River and Through the Woods with an eye to Thanksgiving. Joe DiPietro’s thin comedy isn’t about Turkey Day in name, but speaks to the occasion’s themes of family, faith and food — what one character calls “the three F’s.”

Every Sunday, hapless Nick (Ax Norman) has dinner with his Italian-American grandparents: cantankerous Frank (Lenny Alpert), cooking-obsessed Aida (Edith Ivey), loud but jolly Nunzio and Emma (Neil Alan and Jackie Prucha). With a great job opportunity in Seattle, Nick dreads telling them that he wants to move away.

Much of the play involves the grandparents’ transparent matchmaking and other means to keep Nick around. The jokes involve Nick being pampered, hectored and foisted with food, making the play unfold almost exactly like two hours of rough drafts for the sitcom “Everybody Loves Raymond.” You can sympathize with Nick’s annoyance, but Norman makes his tantrums too broad to be funny.

Things improve in the second act, perhaps because the script runs out of sitcom material and has to think for itself. There’s a clever sequence where the grandparents reason out Trivial Pursuit answers through a remarkably inarticulate series of associations: “I thought the man with the face married the woman with the face.” Though it seems like a contrivance that Nunzio is secretly sick, it deepens Alan’s touching reconciliation scene at the end, while Alpert has an effective speech about Christmas in the old country.

Over the River and Through the Woods ends on a believably bittersweet note rather than forcing a happy one. While Tony Brown’s direction tends to be rudimentary, the play gets away with its schmaltz much more than its bids for yuks.

Over the River isn’t the season’s only play programmed with Thanksgiving in mind: Theatrical Outfit presents Tom Key’s one-man production of Truman Capote’s “The Thanksgiving Visitor” and “A Christmas Memory” at the Rialto Center for the performing Arts Nov. 24-25.

But as usual, Scrooge and his ghosts will be holding theaters hostage. The Alliance Theatre presents associate artistic director emeritus David H. Bell directing his own adaptation (possibly for the last time in Atlanta) of A Christmas Carol, with Chris Kayser donning Scrooge’s cap and nightshirt for the fifth time in a row. Versions of the Dickens story also will be staged at the New American Shakespeare Tavern and Village Playhouses of Roswell, with Firststage Theater Company presenting The Farmdale Avenue Housing Estate Townswomen’s Guild Dramatic Society’s Production of ‘A Christmas Carol.’

ART Station presents the premiere of David Thomas and Nancy Knight’s A Christmas Carol — Southern Style, with Hudson Adams as “Bubbaneezer Scrooge.” Neighborhood Playhouse also dreams of a white trash Christmas with Southern Holly Days, which features a feud between the trailer-dwelling “Blairsville” and upper-crust “Dunwoody” families, as well as the song “Grandma Got Run Over by a Reindeer.”

Most of the holiday plays have musical motifs, and fans of O Brother, Where Art Thou’s old-timey music should check out Phillip DePoy’s Appalachian Christmas Homecoming at Georgia Ensemble Theatre or The Sanders Family Christmas at Theatre in the Square’s Alley Stage. Jomandi’s Black Nativity offers African-American gospel tunes at the New Birth Multiplex in Lithonia. And you can lend an ear to the standards of the 1930s and ’40s with Aurora Theatre’s Christmas Canteen and Theatre in the Square’s The 1940s Radio Hour, in its 20th production for the theater’s 20th year.

Audiences interested in something a little more alternative should see Chick & Boozy’s Fun Time Holiday Special: Live from Hawaii, Chris Blair’s send-up of 1970s holiday (or should that be “hula-day”) variety television. Horizon Theatre brings back the stage adaptation of Santaland Diaries by the acerbic David Sedaris — who must only get coal in his stocking every year. During December and January, Horizon also will be reviving its popular musical I Love You, You’re Perfect, Now Change, which features a book and lyrics by Over the River playwright Joe DiPietro.

I Love You isn’t technically a Christmas show, although it’s supposedly the season for love, which also may account for PushPush Theater’s December production of Romeo and Juliet. The plot of Stage Door Players’ The Man Who Came to Dinner, about a guest who overstays his welcome, is something everyone can identify with this time of year.

At Actor’s Express, Stephen Sondheim musical Company hinges on a birthday party, only not for Jesus, but an unmarried thirtysomething New Yorker. The theater does cover the yuletide season with its “Christmas Cabaret,” a revue of songs from four of Company’s performers, offered on the play’s off-nights.

For children, the Center for Puppetry Arts presents The Shoemaker and the Elves, while Jewish Theatre of the South offers Hershel and the Hanukkah Goblins. But I’m going to be waiting up for Hanukkah Harry, myself.

curt.Holman@creativeloafing.com

Over the River and Through the Woods plays through Dec. 2 at the 14th Street Playhouse, Stage 2, with performances at 7:30 p.m. Thurs. and Fri., 2 and 7:30 p.m. Sat. and 5 p.m. Sun. $18-$20. 678-560-1000. www.artwithin.org.??