2004-2005 Season: Sugar Plum Fairy
A Note from the Playwright
GENTLE THEATREGOER:
LET’S FACE IT. It’s Christmastime and…! You may just not be in the mood.
Perhaps you’re the sort of person who is, by pessimistic nature, ambivalent about such dubious societal inventions as seasons of joy. “To Xmas, or not to Xmas?” is the question you typically ask yourself post-Thanksgiving while kneeling, Hamlet-like, over if not your skull, your plunging mutual funds, soaring cholesterol counts, or unwinking Blackberry. Or perhaps you feel there has just been too much bad news this year to merit a cheerful Yuletide moment. Your totems of gloom may involve yon heinous election results, the Dear John or Dear Jane letter that came just in time to kick off the holiday season, illness in the family (or just as bad sometimes, those annoying relatives who keep returning to one’s home like cockroaches, unfellable by any natural means).
And don’t forget those small but telling woes of the category of “straw that broke the camel’s back.” I’m thinking of the letter I got recently that began: “Dear Parent, This is just a note to inform you while in school your child was exposed to head lice. What is/are head lice?” (Cheerful diagram included.)
So yes, we all suffer: by December, our troubles lie in piles. Mr. Claus’ special day may strike us, in 2004, as nothing more than a gelatinous ribbon-twined Carb Festival in which we do not wish to Morris dance. As a playwright, though, a war-ravaged veteran of many subscriber seasons, I command you, exhort you, beg you: Get ON the Christmas train, my friends, or you will get crushed UNDER it! Save yourselves! Climb aboard NOW!
WHY DO I SAY THIS? Like some, I myself used to be a cynic about what I thought was America’s most overblown of holidays. I mocked Christmas and, even worse for the spiraling fiduciary trajectory of my career, I mocked Christmas theatre...which for several decades I thought, quite frankly, was not even a genre. And yet, year after year, I watched in amazement how—in spite of all prior evidence indicating doom—audiences would skip the more serious theatrical pieces and flock to where the fake snow was flying, to their beloved creaky Christmas shows, dressed to the nines oftentimes in jaunty red-and-green teddy bear cardigans.
I used to laugh—but then came that portentous night one cold December. I was standing onstage at a faraway repertory theatre, one breath before launching into my culturally-challenging, thematically-difficult, defiantly NON-CHRISTMAS-THEMED one woman show Aliens in America. The house lights went out. I looked out into the dark. And what gazed back was a veritable sea of teddy bear eyes, quietly blinking, like Hitchcock’s The Birds. I was outnumbered 300 to 1. And in that moment I knew that whatever my high-as-Everest-artistic aspirations, come Christmastime, the teddy bears—and sparkling candy canes—and dancing candy canes—must always win. It’s The Circle of Life.
So Joyous Tidings, Jolly Fellows! Have a Merry Yule, and please do enjoy our festive holiday show! Or else.
— Sandra Tsing Loh