What a Relief It Is

Alan Ayckbourn’s comedy, “Season’s Greetings,†is a dour reminder that if things are bad, Christmas makes them worse.

   Not that this play at Theatreworks in New Milford isn’t funny. It is, the way absurd is funny, and outrageous is funny, and surprise is funny, with everyone in the family yearning for love, recognition, even regard. And, not getting any of these. In fact, these characters end up with more of what they don’t want.

   The clan convenes at the Bunker household in a comfy English suburb where Belinda the hostess (Tracy Hurd) has done all the right stuff: a large joint for dinner, lights on the tree, a mountain of wrapped presents including one from her husband, which she was obliged to buy for herself. Trouble begins as Belinda and her sister’s date, Clive (Nicholas Polifrone), a novelist whose first effort is listed as number 17 on the bestseller list, are drawn forcefully, and comically, to each other. Neville (Viv Berger), the husband, is outraged. Rachel, the sister (Alison Bernhardt), is outraged. Everyone else is outraged, too, more or less, and all is resolved, more or less, by gunpowder.

   Oddly, the most hilarious, and telling, moments in “Season’s Greetings†occur during Bernard’s (Philip Cook) puppet show. This kindly and incompetent doctor has mounted it for years, much to the ire and ennui of everyone including the invited offspring. It’s a play in 16 scenes about three pigs: Hubert, Wilfred and Ginger, and their families, and a wolf. Bernard berates Pattie (Mikki Harkin), his assistant who is pregnant with a child she does not want, who keeps handing him the wrong puppet pig, when all three are absolutely indistinguishable in their cute puppet pigginess. Much to everyone’s relief, save Bernard’s, the puppet theater collapses after two scenes. Then the bungling doctor ends up misdiagnosing a patient as dead and leaves, humiliated. Bereft. Just like every one else in “Season’s Greetings.â€

   So, once again, Theatreworks presents a Christmas play that is original, odd, funny, nicely executed and not at all uplifting. For Ayckbourn does not see the season as an opportunity to enjoy one’s blessings but, rather, it’s a time to review the vexations and disappointments of our lives. Something of a relief, I’d say.

Alan Ayckbourn’s “Season’s Greetings,†deftly directed by Glenn Couture, runs at Theatreworks in New Milford through Jan. 2, Fridays and Saturdays at 8 p.m., and Sundays at 2 p.m.

For tickets and information, call 860-350-6863, or go to www.theatreworks.us

Latest News

South Kent School’s unofficial March reunion

Elmarko Jackson was named a 2023 McDonald’s All American in his senior year at South Kent School. He helped lead the Cardinals to a New England Prep School Athletic Conference (NEPSAC) AAA title victory and was recruited to play at the University of Kansas. This March he will play point guard for the Jayhawks when they enter the tournament as a No. 4 seed against (13) Samford University.

Riley Klein

SOUTH KENT — March Madness will feature seven former South Kent Cardinals who now play on Division 1 NCAA teams.

The top-tier high school basketball program will be well represented with graduates from each of the past three years heading to “The Big Dance.”

Keep ReadingShow less
Hotchkiss grads dancing with Yale

Nick Townsend helped Yale win the Ivy League.

Screenshot from ESPN+ Broadcast

LAKEVILLE — Yale University advanced to the NCAA men’s basketball tournament after a buzzer-beater win over Brown University in the Ivy League championship game Sunday, March 17.

On Yale’s roster this year are two graduates of The Hotchkiss School: Nick Townsend, class of ‘22, and Jack Molloy, class of ‘21. Townsend wears No. 42 and Molloy wears No. 33.

Keep ReadingShow less
Handbells of St. Andrew’s to ring out Easter morning

Anne Everett and Bonnie Rosborough wait their turn to sound notes as bell ringers practicing to take part in the Easter morning service at St. Andrew’s Church.

Kathryn Boughton

KENT—There will be a joyful noise in St. Andrew’s Church Easter morning when a set of handbells donated to the church some 40 years ago are used for the first time by a choir currently rehearsing with music director Susan Guse.

Guse said that the church got the valuable three-octave set when Harlem Valley Psychiatric Center closed in the late 1980s and the bells were donated to the church. “The center used the bells for music therapy for younger patients. Our priest then was chaplain there and when the center closed, he brought the bells here,” she explained.

Keep ReadingShow less
Picasso’s American debut was a financial flop
Picasso’s American debut was a financial flop
Penguin Random House

‘Picasso’s War” by Foreign Affairs senior editor Hugh Eakin, who has written about the art world for publications like The New York Review of Books, Vanity Fair, The New Yorker and The New York Times, is not about Pablo Picasso’s time in Nazi-occupied Paris and being harassed by the Gestapo, nor about his 1937 oil painting “Guernica,” in response to the aerial bombing of civilians in the Basque town during the Spanish Civil War.

Instead, the Penguin Random House book’s subtitle makes a clearer statement of intent: “How Modern Art Came To America.” This war was not between military forces but a cultural war combating America’s distaste for the emerging modernism that had flourished in Europe in the early decades of the 20th century.

Keep ReadingShow less