‘Tuna’ co-creator takes on the holidays
Christmas brings out the best in many people, but theater artist Jaston Williams’ mom was not one of them.
“My mother was so much fun and so delightful and fun to be around, and the first sprig of holly that goes up, she’d turn into Gen. Franco,” he said, referring to the ruthless dictator who once led Spain. “The season had a negative effect on her. So I’d written this piece a few years ago about her and Christmas.”
The piece is part of “Blood and Holly: Christmas West of the Pecos,” a solo show Williams will perform live for socially distanced audiences at the Tobin Center for the Performing Arts.
He included some other monologues in the show, too, including one in which a man who received five colognes for Christmas frets about body odor, and another in which a mother attempting to write a Christmas letter is constantly interrupted by her family.
“My favorite piece, with all the division, which is about to drive me nuts, is about a no-nonsense mama in West Texas, and she’s got twin sons that disagree on everything,” he said. “One of them is driving a pickup, one of them drives a Prius; one’s an Aggie, one’s a Longhorn. And she has a rule: You cannot bring up the name Obama at Christmas.”
They can’t quite manage that, though. So they are kicked out.
“They end up having to sleep in the same bed in the local motel, and they reconnect and realize the one thing they hate equally is Notre Dame football — that somehow brings them together,” he said. “It’s that sort of thing, when people are kind of forced to be together, they will find things they like about each other.
“It’s amazing that once we take away all of the things that cause us to react knee-jerk, you can find things you mutually love or, even better, mutually hate. It is Texas, after all.”
The show is part of Williams’ slow, careful return to performing. He had a busy spring and summer mapped out, but everything was canceled because of the pandemic. He has waited things out with his family in Lockhart.
“There are worse places than my house to be quarantined,” he said. “I have plenty of room to go nuts.”
Williams’ first professional outing since the shutdowns started in March came a few weeks ago in Austin, where he filmed “I Saw the Light,” a solo piece he wrote about people who said they saw UFOS in the skies over Lubbock in 1951.
“I’ve wanted to do it for years,” he said. “The people at the State Theatre in Austin put up the money to film it, and so we shot it, and I’m real proud of it. They’ll be editing it, and we’ll be getting it out to the public in January.”
It took him awhile to get comfortable performing without any sort of response from an audience. But he eventually settled into a groove, and the whole thing was finished in two days.
“It was so good to work again,” he said. “Everyone in our business is unemployed right now. This put about a dozen people to work. That’s a great feeling.”
He’s glad to get back to performing, especially during the holidays. For decades, he and Joe Sears, with whom he co-wrote and co-starred in a much-adored series of plays set in the tiny Texas town of Tuna, performed “A Tuna Christmas” all over the country around this time of year. They often performed on the holiday itself, which they viewed as a bit of a public service.
“People really need it,” Williams said. “People who would come to a show on Christmas Day or Christmas Eve had been with their families for days on end, and they’re ready to kill ’em. They want to go someplace they don’t have to talk to them.”
Among Williams’ favorite memories of those performances was one given at the Circle in the Square Theatre in New York during a blizzard. At one point during the show, he had to exit through the rear of the theater, run down the alley and re-enter through the lobby. The company manager spent a big chunk of the performance shoveling and reshoveling the alley to make sure Williams could pull it off safely.
“I’d talk to people later who would say, ‘We were there the night of the storm, and you were coming in with snow in your hair. It was wonderful,’ ” he recalled. “Theater is a personal experience; every night is a personal experience. I’m looking forward to getting back to that.”
He has a soft spot for San Antonio, where he and Sears spent the early years of their careers and where they started writing “Greater Tuna.” Since the collaborators retired from touring in the “Tuna” shows, Williams has made regular appearances here with his solo works. This marks the first time he’ll perform at the Tobin Center.
It’ll be some time before he performs elsewhere. He has no plans to tour “Blood and Holly.” He is waiting until the coronavirus vaccine is widely available and it’s safe for people to gather to revive his busy performance schedule.
He likened the possible outcome of venturing out too widely too soon to the “Love Story” spoof on “The Carol Burnett Show,” in which young lovers revel in a future of joy and happiness until Burnett gives a delicate cough, a sign that she is not long for this world.
“We’ve been so careful, it would be a shame to blow it in the last 10 seconds,” he said. “I don’t want to be Carol Burnett.”