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Southern comfort
Capote's sentimental Holiday Memories a nontraditional seasonal treasure
By Brian Fitzgerald
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Buddy, played by Chris Conner (CFA'06), and Aunt Sook (Helen-Jean Arthur) are social outcasts -- and best friends -- inseparable until "life separates us." Photo by Stratton McCrady. |
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A feel-good holiday reminiscence from an author most famous for a true-crime book? It might be considered a stretch to expect a sentimental short story from the man who wrote a frighteningly graphic account of the massacre of a Kansas family, an up-close look at murder, prison, and the criminal mind.
Then again, Truman Capote's 1965 In Cold Blood is considered a classic example of a new genre -- literary nonfiction -- because of its richly descriptive language and effective narrative technique. And audiences seeing Capote's Holiday Memories at the BU Theatre will immediately be struck by the author's talent for vivid recall, at the same time beautifully stylish and matter-of-fact.
“Truman Capote was first and foremost a journalist,” says Jim Petosa, director of Holiday Memories. “But when he allowed his poetic sensibility to intrude on his journalistic sense, the result was some really unique writing. In recalling Thanksgiving and Christmas events of his childhood, he had the same eye for detail.”
Capote, who died in 1984 just before his 60th birthday, is credited with writing journalism crafted with the structure and language of literature, and his prose translated seamlessly to the movie screen. The film of In Cold Blood received an Oscar nomination in 1968. Similarly, his memoirs about his childhood in Alabama during the Great Depression worked well on the stage: the 1966 television play A Christmas Memory won an Emmy.
Holiday Memories is a combination of A Christmas Memory and The Thanksgiving Visitor, a 1968 story about a boy named Buddy, played by Chris Conner (CFA'06), whose best friend, his sixtyish Aunt Sook, invites the school bully to the family's Thanksgiving dinner. The boy, played by Bob Braswell (CFA'04) is Buddy's nemesis, and the meal ends in disaster.
“The adaptation of these stories, by Russell Vandenbroucke, uses Capote's exact words,” says Petosa, the director of CFA's school of theatre arts. And what lavish language it is.
The narrator, played by William Gardiner (CFA'07), “is an older Truman Capote coming back and encountering himself as a boy and his relationship with his aunt,” explains Petosa. Gardiner, in a rich Southern drawl, colorfully describes Aunt Sook:
A woman with shorn white hair is standing by the window. She is wearing tennis shoes and a shapeless gray sweater over a summery calico dress. She is small and sprightly, like a bantam hen; but, due to a youthful illness, her shoulders are pitifully hunched. Her face is remarkable -- not unlike Lincoln's, craggy like that, and tinted by the sun and wind; but it is delicate too, finely boned, and her eyes are sherry-colored and timid. “Oh my,” she exclaims, her breath smoking the window pane, “it's fruitcake weather!”
Played by veteran Broadway and off-Broadway actress Helen-Jean Arthur, Aunt Sook is basically still a child in an elderly body. Every year before Christmas, she enlists Buddy in a harebrained mission to bake 30 fruitcakes to send to such random people as President Franklin Roosevelt and Abner Packer, “the driver of the six o'clock bus from Mobile, who exchanges waves with us every day as he passes in a dust-cloud whoosh.”
Whiskey is the most important fruitcake ingredient, so Aunt Sook and Buddy embark on their annual walk to a raucous riverfront speakeasy to buy moonshine from notorious Native American clubowner Haha Jones. They successfully make all 30 fruitcakes, but Aunt Sook riles her family when she is caught giving Buddy a few sips of leftover whiskey. After a stern lecture from Buddy's parents, she is teary and disconsolate, but the boy pulls her out of her crying spell by reminding her that they still have one task left: tromping into the woods to get a Christmas tree.
To be sure, Holiday Memories is not a traditional holiday tale, but it is still seasonally sentimental. And Petosa knows this full well. He has two productions of the play under his belt: in 1992 and 1998 he directed it at the Olney Theatre Center for the Arts outside Washington, D.C., where he is also artistic director.
“Truman Capote's Holiday Memories is an alternative to traditional Christmas programming, giving you all the elements you want from a seasonal offering,” he says, “but with a certain poetic dimension that makes it incredibly worthwhile.”
Last year, when Petosa and CFA faculty talked about what plays they wanted to present, “we thought that a seasonal show might appeal to a general audience, and at the same time enable the school of theatre arts and the Huntington Theatre Company to join forces in a cooperative venture on a full-scale production,” he says. The effort, known as the Boston University Professional Theatre Initiative, takes advantage of the professional theater company's residency at Boston University, enabling BU acting students to work with experienced actors.
Petosa feels that the play is perfectly cast. His association with guest artist Arthur began when she worked with him in A Road to Mecca at the Olney Theatre Center, where they also collaborated on Thérèse Raquin and The Glass Menagerie. “Helen-Jean Arthur is terrific,” says Petosa. “I thought of her immediately when I considered doing this production.” Conner, the young Capote, is a sophomore in the CFA acting program. “We normally don't have sophomores enter the casting pool for these plays until the second half of their sophomore year,” Petosa says. “But because he was so right for the role, we didn't want to pass up the opportunity, so the faculty and I determined that we would give him a shot at this, and he has been great.”
Truman Capote's Holiday Memories is being presented at the BU Theatre, Studio 210, 264 Huntington Ave., through December 21. For more information, see the calendar listing on page 4 or call the box office at 617-266-0800.
7
November 2003
Boston University
Office of University Relations