These aren’t your traditional Christmas Eve moments, but they have their charm.
• Mark, young husband who works 12-hour days, comes home to find Leah, young wife who misses him, decorating their apartment on Seattle’s Capitol Hill. He puts on music and asks her to dance. Romance flowers; after all, this couple are real-life newlyweds.
• Patrick, neighbor and longtime bachelor, confesses his feelings for Mark’s mother Helen, who is speechless but only at first.
• Elise, waitress and cake decorator, finds herself in the middle of all this; she’s been delivered by taxi driver Serge, whom she compares to Bigfoot — for three good reasons.
And we’re off for a “This Christmas” ride, opening Friday, Nov. 23, for a three-week run at the Port Angeles Community Playhouse.
The production, written by Chicago-based actor and playwright Anne Kennedy Brady, stars the recently married Tia Stephens and Edwin J. Anderson, Pat Owens as Patrick, Kathy Balducci as Helen, Jessica McKenzie as Elise and Michael Jay Sickles as Serge the cabbie. They’ve all made plans for Christmas. Everything turns out otherwise.
“Normally, with Christmas shows, you’ve seen one, you’ve seen them all. But this is different,” said Owens.
He nodded to his friend Jim Dries, “This Christmas’” director. Dries has the touch when it comes to assembling a good cast, added Owens, himself an actor and director for some 50 years now.
Dries has invited Brady to Port Angeles for a talkback, a post-performance discussion, on Friday, Nov. 30; another talkback is set for Tuesday, Dec. 4.
“This Christmas” is “all about everyone’s connection to each other,” said Stephens. The daughter of Port Angeles actor, director and costumer Richard Stephens, she directed and appeared earlier this fall in A.R. Gurney’s “Sylvia” at Olympic Theatre Arts.
Anderson was in that show’s cast too. And yes, Stephens said, it is a delight to be in a play, twice, with your actual husband.
“This Christmas” comes to the Port Angeles Community Playhouse, 1235 E. Lauridsen Blvd., at 7:30 p.m. Fridays, Saturdays and Tuesdays, and at 2 p.m. Sundays through Dec. 9.
Reserved seats are $15 for adults and $8 for students at all shows; on Tuesday nights, any remaining tickets are sold at the door for $8.
To buy tickets in advance, visit Brocante Antiques, 105 W. First St. in Port Angeles, call 360-452-6651 or see www.PACommunityPlayers.com. That site also has information about another show on the heels of this one: the Children’s Theater Christmas Spectacular. That production, by and for youngsters, runs Dec. 14-16.
