Alley Theatre’s Christmas Play Takes on the Vacation Blues

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The vacation season can suck typically. All of the tidings of consolation and pleasure can ring hole to these of us combating loneliness, loss, marginalization, or a tough patch of plain ol’ humbug. How can it actually be the happiest time of yr when our personal struggling doesn’t take a vacation break?

Don’t fear, Houston. Alley Theatre understands you.

Playwright Isaac Gómez’s The Night time Shift Earlier than Christmas made its world premiere at Alley Theatre on December 5 and runs till December 29. Directed by KJ Sanchez, this one-person present stars Briana J. Resa as Margot, a annoyed fast-food employee on the fictional Completely happy Burger. She voluntarily works solo throughout the Christmas Eve shift, frying up orders in underneath 90 seconds, buying and selling barbs with drive-through prospects, and shooing away a homeless individual attempting to remain heat on a uncommon chilly Houston night time.

After which she’s possessed by the spirit of her lifeless good friend and coworker.

“The Night time Shift earlier than Christmas is an grownup Christmas Carol,” Sanchez says. “It is humorous. It is transferring. It is simply raunchy sufficient for a enjoyable night time out with a little bit cocktail, which you’ll be able to deliver into the theater with you.”

As the only performer, Resa embodies Margot, the 4 ghosts, and the auxiliary characters throughout the ghosts’ tales. Orlando Arriaga supplies environmental voiceovers, however doesn’t seem reside. Intelligent costume adjustments and staging point out which ghost is current to supply recommendation. (The primary possession is very placing, nearly showing as a levitation with rigorously choreographed push-pull actions revealing chain necklaces and pink hair extensions.) However Resa’s efficiency retains The Night time Shift Earlier than Christmas grounded in place.

“What I really like about Margot is that she represents a modern-day Scrooge… She’s an on a regular basis lady. She’s working at a fast-food restaurant. And the way many people have been there?” Resa says. “I really like the tie-in that makes her recognizable to so lots of the folks which are going to stroll off the road and stroll into the theater. And he or she is a little bit of a Scrooge, as a result of life is hard, proper? Issues occur and now we have to really feel.”

Gómez was closely concerned within the manufacturing as properly. Initially hailing from El Paso/Ciudad Juárez, they consulted with the Alley’s Hispanic advocacy group El Zócalo so as to add Houston-specific touches like an El Bolillo namedrop and Completely happy Burger’s implied rivalry with Whataburger. Margot was written particularly for Resa, with script adjustments made to higher showcase her prodigious performing abilities.

“It is such a privilege to work on new works with the playwright… It appears like strolling out in probably the most tailor-made and fitted-to-you outfit you may think about. So being a part of the method, being on the desk, being a part of these conversations, it offers you such a way of group round that piece,” Resa says. “Isaac is ready to not essentially incorporate all of the concepts, however incorporate concepts that work for the play… That is actually, actually particular and distinctive, and one thing that’s arduous to return by.”

Throughout the mundane confines of Completely happy Burger, with a bright-yellow smiley face persistently hovering above like a deranged warden, Resa grapples with Margot’s hitherto unresolved trauma. She crafts distinctive postures and voices for every character, typically snapping backwards and forwards between them at a split-second tempo when Gómez’s script necessitates. The cautious timing and precision required for such a demanding position as Margot solely works when within the tremendously skilled and succesful fingers of a staff on par with the Alley Theatre.

“There’s quite a lot of magic within the present. What I imply by that’s, the way in which that the characters seem and the costumes they’ve, there’s quite a lot of theatrical magic in it. So it was actually enjoyable for me. It is a burger joint, and we had the problem of determining methods to truly cook dinner burgers on stage. I really like enjoyable puzzles like that.”  Sanchez says.

Burgers and fries actually are ready proper there on the ground, filling the Alley’s Neuhaus Stage with the perfume of grease and meat, the sizzle of a fast Christmas Eve meal. It provides a formidable layer to the environment of an already masterful manufacturing, whereas underscoring Margot’s self-imposed alienation. She turns down a household operate to as an alternative serve an more and more belligerent public, her solely firm a couple of grilled onions, hamburger buns that fall to the ground, and an ominous Santa Claus ornament dancing and speaking on the worst attainable instances. The monotony and slowly mounting claustrophobia comforts Margot as she escapes the guilt, grief, and ache of a Christmas passed by.

“For those who’re a smaller household, or everyone else appears cheerful and blissful, and if you do not have that, it might make you cranky,” Sanchez says.

The Night time Shift Earlier than Christmas must be a one-person present because of this. A play centered on the uncooked reality that Christmas isn’t at all times the festive feast of smiles and mirth it’s branded as. Margot isn’t a Dickensian spendthrift whose wealth and avarice separate them from the coal-streaked London poor—although the Alley is operating it as a thematic parallel to The Christmas Carol taking part in on the principle stage. She’s a girl in grave ache, unable to maneuver ahead in life as recollections replay in her thoughts.

In different phrases, it’s a vacation leisure possibility for these years when issues do not fairly really feel merry and shiny. The Night time Shift Earlier than Christmas exhibits us that it’s OK, regular even, to need to knock Santa off his sleigh for being so smug in his jolliness. It’s a burger-and-fries-scented ode to the grumpy, the lonely, and the damage. But it surely’s hopeful, too, instructing us that the true that means of Christmas is what we individually resolve to make of it.

“It is by no means too late to search out redemption, and it is by no means too late to consider in your self once more,” Sanchez says. “It is by no means too late to exit for an evening and snicker with a bunch of individuals and really feel with a bunch of individuals and expertise some group effervescence.”