Christmas with the Texans

No, I can’t do it. I cannot, I must not, I will not recommend to a person of your refinement and taste this year’s Christmas movie.

More’s the pity, though, since you’ll be missing out on one of the few bits of actual humor on offer, not to mention a small corner of gay cultural history.

The work in question is A Tuna Christmas by Joe Sears and Jaston Williams, co-written and directed by Ed Howard. We are playing fast and loose with the definition of “movie” this year, since the work is actually a filmed version of the same-titled stage play. The show has a gimmick, that all the characters are played by Sears and Williams. While that unisex casting is the hook that markets the show, this work is not drag in any conventional sense…these are actors playing characters, some of whom happen to be women. All the characters — male and female — live, breathe, and are a threat to wildlife. For the uninitiated, Tuna is the third-smallest town in Texas…West Texas, specifically. (If you don’t know the difference, you’ve never been there.) It is also a franchise: A Tuna Christmas is the seasonal offshoot of the original play, A Greater Tuna. For Christmas, the residents of Tuna are preparing for several holiday events, whose centerpiece is the big yard display contest; events are reported by the local radio station, whose call letters are OKKK.

(Did you just faint? Take some salts and keep breathing…there’s nothing dark here, it’s an art form called “comedy,” it wasn’t meant to be taken seriously.)

The display contest has been won for fourteen years running by the town’s wealthy resident, Vera Carp. Vera hopes to win again this year and retire the trophy. Vera’s much less wealthy and long-suffering friend and neighbor, Bertha Bumiller, is attempting to make a Hallmark Moment with her two teen-age children, Stanley (finishing his reform school probation), and Charlene (stage-struck, and in love with the local theatre director, Joe Bob Lipsey, who is also the town homosexual). Bertha’s attempt at Hallmark goes about as well as it does with any two teenagers. We also come to know Didi Snavely, owner of Didi Snavely’s Used Weapons (“If we can’t kill it, it’s immortal!”), along with her husband R.R., who sees space aliens (“looked just like a flying chalupa, only without the guacamole”). And later in the show we meet Inita Goodwin and Helen Bedd, two hard-working diner waitresses who finally make good.

In short, Tuna gives us the most un-Dickensian group of characters ever to confront Christmas.

It also satirizes a great deal about small town life. Religion is taken seriously: Vera is a committee chair for the Smut Snatchers of the New Order, who have decided that “round young virgins” need to be censored from “Silent Night.” Marriage gets pretty real: Bertha’s husband is not only missing on Christmas Eve, Bertha knows he’s off playing poker “with that red-headed female bank clerk from Sand City.” Ever resourceful, Didi Snavely demonstrates how to sing a Christmas carol and smoke…simultaneously.

The character of Stanley, Bertha’s oldest son, catches one’s gay attention. Stanley is not described as gay (that small town stereotype is taken by Joe Bob), but he is an outsider. Unattractive, distant, and disheveled, he is the object of town gossip. His Aunt Pearl, whom we know from A Greater Tuna, manages to help Stanley both complete his probation and escape Tuna: “Folks in this town will just keep you looking back,” she tells him as she packs him off to his new life.

In taxidermy, a career you can always fall back on.

Sears and Williams’ first show, A Greater Tuna, debuted in Austin in 1981, and was touring to San Francisco by the middle 1980s, where the Curmudgeon first encountered it. The city needed that show badly by then. AIDS burst onto everyone’s consciousness in 1981 (The Village Voice picked up the story in May, The New York Times not until July), and by 1982, Star Pharmacy in the tres-gay Castro neighborhood was sounding the alarm with poster-size pictures in their window of local men’s Kaposi’s sarcoma lesions, over slogans telling us, “If he has these sores, do not have sex with him.” Posted with the men’s consent, the notices were public service announcements: the disease was new, the doctors didn’t know anything about it yet, and our friends — our gay families — were withering and dying in our midst. The incubation period of AIDS is roughly ten years, and by the mid- to late-1980s, deaths from infections sustained before the virus was identified were hitting gay men hard and fast: we really were attending multiple funerals some weeks.

Into that darkness strode Bertha and Vera and their kin, especially Aunt Pearl. San Francisco — gay and straight — welcomed them as our own.

The show settled into a long run in San Francisco, what today might even be called a “residency,” in the Vegas sense. In one of the more surreal intersections of Art and Politics, Vera Carp even ran for mayor in 1988 and got on the ballot. Since the outgoing mayor, Diane Feinstein, had been the embodiment of big money, “downtown” interests, there were more than the usual number of candidates running as outsiders in the election, claiming, “I’m not one of the boys.” Vera’s bumper sticker showed her portrait in full drag, with the slogan, “Vera Carp for Mayor — She IS one of the boys.” Sadly, she lost to Art Agnos.

Child, we needed Tuna’s laughs.

With all that feel-good, are there flaws in the work? Sure, if you want to quibble. First of all, if you are Politically Correct, either check your philosophy at the door or run for the hills: anything and anyone is a target for Tuna’s humor, including us gay types, midgets (hey, at least they were represented), and Episcopalians. Live theatre needs to be a full evening’s entertainment, three hours or more with an intermission, whereas films conventionally run two hours or less…some editing for video would have lost some of the fun but bestowed some focus. Much of the second act is devoted to our waitresses, Inita and Helen, and seems less polished than the first half of the show…it might have been grist for an edit. And wigs and costumes designed for quick changes offstage suffer a bit from being seen in close-up. But none of that matters, really. It takes a great deal of acting skill to make an absurd character believable, and this Sears and Willams accomplish fully. The show redeems some of its weaker moments with its ending, in which the major characters all find love, of one sort or another.

Which gets us to the real reason we will not recommend A Tuna Christmas to you. Although the show pokes fun at all its characters (and by extension, most of us in the audience), there is nothing judgmental or mean going on. The characters are our own families, and as crazy as they make us, we still love them. The world, I fear, has grown too vengeful and full of itself to receive such a work. It certainly has grown too small for Tuna’s residents: like all of us from the South, they are pre-Copernicans, convinced the universe revolves around them, and them alone…and for the better part of three hours, it does. So while we cannot recommend the show to you, for myself I will make the annual trip back to Tuna to see the folks…it is Christmas, and they are family.

And with that happy thought we wrap up another year here at The Byzantine Review. Merry Christmas, Happy Holidays, and a Happy and obscenely prosperous New Year to all!

The Curmudgeon

(Carolers out front, Cratchit! ...Disburse them.)