Theater’s favorite small town celebrates Christmas
It’s Christmas time in Tuna, the third smallest town in Texas, where the Lion’s Club is too liberal and Patsy Cline still reigns.
The Vortex Theatre will perform the second installment of “Greater Tuna” in an act of seasonal spite beginning on Friday, Nov. 30.
Quick-change actors Joel Miller and Benjamin Liberman play 22 roles, regularly donning dresses and wigs in drag.
If you stress out at the mere thought of the holidays, don’t worry. The folks in Tuna see their Christmas cheer dwindling all around them.
Town snob Vera Carp still leads the Smut-Snatchers of the New Order. She aims to scrub the filth from a troubled production of “A Christmas Carol,” obsessing over the line “Round yon virgins,” in “Silent Night,” which she hears as “Round young virgins.”
A mysterious vandal known as the Christmas Phantom threatens to destroy the holiday yard contest. The little theater’s version of “A Christmas Carol” teeters on the edge of cancellation. To make matters even dimmer, the electric company is threatening to shut off the theater lights.
Even Bertha Bumiller, normally the patron of patience, is at her wit’s end with her three children. She orders her sullen daughter to “Get down here, now, or I’ll put on the Andy Williams album.”
Written by Ed Howard, Joe Sears and Jaston Williams, the play is the sequel to “Greater Tuna,” hatched in 1980,
that morphed into a four-part series including “Red, White and Tuna” and “Tuna Does Vegas.” A bastion of narrow-mindedness, bouffants and bigotry, the plays depict the Texas town with affection and a withering sense of satire.
“It’s the same world and the same characters,” director Marc Comstock said.
Radio station OKKK DJs Thurston Wheelis and Arles Struvie supply the through line of news/gossip running throughout the play.
“There are a lot of similarities between all of us and these people,” Comstock said. “Everybody knows everybody and they all seem to have their allies and nemeses. They’re characters but not caricatures.
“At the end of the day, they really do want what’s best for this town and its citizens.”
Comstock directed the sold-out run of “Greater Tuna” that ran during the summer of 2017.