Planet Christmas: Until the Sea Shall Free Them

A new and original work of prodigious audacity, Planet Christmas by Contemporary Theater Company playwright-in-residence Andy Hoover, is unlike any holiday-themed stage production you’ve ever seen. It draws from a diverse variety of sources ranging from H.G. Wells to Leonard Cohen, sometimes planting allusions so obscure that, like James Joyce, Hoover seems to be playing a game with the audience, but he is so careful to get the history right that even his few anachronisms must be deliberate. Ultimately, Planet Christmas is an irreverent satirical existentialist morality tale so inclusive that one of the characters is pagan, one is Jewish and the one most overtly religious is an android without a soul.

The play consists of nine scenes all occurring in the same place: the boardwalk of Pine Beach in New Jersey, but at different times across about 1,000 years. Five of the scenes involve the same characters related to a fictional “Planet Christmas Superstore” that sells wintertime tchotchkes such as snow globes all summer between Memorial Day weekend and Christmas Day. The staff from 1995 to 1999 are (with one exception) all hired for their Christmas-y names. The sales girls are required to dress in elf costumes: cynical Holly (Ari Kassabian), resigned Ivy (Emily Rodriguez), and virginally innocent Mary (Kaitlyn Sweeny). Back-room stock clerk Balthazar (Sami Avigdor) escapes the costume requirement, as does his newly hired co-worker Summer (Magdalen Papa). Manager Carole (Stephanie Rodger) is the epitome of the 1990s career woman, spouting non-stop corporate-speak jargon.

Owner and founder Cole (Terry Simpson) bears a distinct physical resemblance to Santa Claus and actually appears in one scene wearing the iconic red suit. A recurring joke is that no one can figure out how the name “Cole” has anything to do with Christmas, and several of the characters recite parts of the nursery rhyme “Old King Cole was a merry old soul…” trying to discover any reference to the holiday, but the joke is that “Cole” is a diminutive for “Nicholas,” as in “Saint Nicholas,” which no one realizes.

The first scene of the play is set in 1524 when a French-speaking sailor, Emanuel (Brendan Kelley), having fallen overboard from what is implied by the date to be the first expedition of Giovanni da Verrazzano, washes ashore bedraggled and meets a Native American of the Lenape tribe (Phil Ryng) who gives him a blanket and food, in gratitude for which the sailor gives him a small ornamental star he has carved during the voyage. In a later scene set in 1945, Cole narrates an account of himself as an infant with his mother Judith (Isabella Bennett) and her encounter with a Woodcutter (and carpenter?) (Ryng), in which the latter gives her the same ornamental star explicitly described as a “boon.” 

In this context, the word “boon” is very archaic, meaning “prayer” and a cognate of the French “bon” meaning “good.” Boon is also the name of an H.G. Wells novel substantially concerned with whether memories can exist outside of an individual mind, persisting in a sort of collective human consciousness. Exactly this question is addressed in a scene set in the year 2509 where a technologically advanced researcher, Epiphany Birdsong (Riley Cash), and his android JD (Ashley Macamaux) use a futuristic “chrono-viewer” to observe the events that have taken place at the same site in the past. (Could Planet Christmas be an allusion to the 1963 novel Planet of the Apes, in which “racial memory” also plays a part?) They are distracted by fisherman Remainer (Ryng again), a denizen of the post-apocalyptic wilderness that New Jersey has become in an echo of Noah’s flood. The soulless android, angered as if encountering money-changers in the Temple, has been programmed to recite verses from the King James Version, admonishing Epiphany into giving his boots and belt to the less fortunate fisherman.

Epiphany’s primary interest is the fictional 19th century science-fiction writer Margaret Crackstone (Stephanie Traversa) who, attended by her father’s trusted attorney Richard Hendrick (Stephen Strenio), has been exiled to the New Jersey seashore for several months in 1844 as a result of pseudo-diagnosis with a panoply of conditions including “ennui” and “hysteria.” Sentenced by a crackpot doctor to write Christmas-themed verses to cheer her up in an attempt to cure what our modern era would recognize as depression, her poetry expresses a dark view reminiscent of the pessimism and dread of many real luminaries of the genre, notably Edgar Allan Poe and Jules Verne. The novel Paris in the Twentieth Century, written in 1863 and set in the year 1960, was so dystopian that it was rejected by Verne’s publisher and did not appear in print until 1994.

Margaret and Richard discuss A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens, just issued a few months before their conversation, which Richard has only partly read due to press of time. (That’s a strange conceit, given that the story is very short and the New York popular edition, printed in 1844, is only 32 pages.) Margaret speculates about possible horrific endings, unable to imagine any happy conclusion. Her prescience is suggested by her anachronistic use of the term “bicycle,” a word that would not be invented for another couple of decades. Ironically, some view A Christmas Carol as the first story involving time travel.

Finally, we meet Eve (Jos Silbert) under circumstances it would be best not to explain in a review.

The cast is uniformly wonderful, but Kassabian as “Holly” truly shines as the dominant personality in the Planet Christmas Superstore. Ryng is over-the-top, especially as the 26th century fisherman sputtering nonsense surviving historical phrases such as “Pokémon” and “Pikachu” along with Leonard Cohen lyrics. Simpson as “Cole” capably carries an entire scene set in 1945, as does Traversa as “Margaret Crackstone” in a scene set in 1844. Sweeny as “Mary” masters a transformation of her character at the core of the plot, effectively helped by Papa as “Summer,” Avigdor as “Balthazar,” and Rodriguez as “Ivy.”

During intermission, the lobby was occupied by a quintet singing traditional and modern carols a cappella in a part-song style; do not miss this.

Anyone who loves Finnegans Wake by James Joyce will love Planet Christmas by Andy Hoover, although I’m reluctant to say this for fear of inappropriately sending potential audience members fleeing in terror.  The play is certainly enjoyable on a much more straightforward level as a series of related stories that are in some way about Christmas, but it will reward intellectual efforts to tear into it like matryoshka dolls, and in this sense it is far more thoughtfully ambitious than the typical Christmas fare on the stage. Besides, it’s the most fun you can have in New Jersey.

Planet Christmas (world premiere), directed by Rebecca Maxfield, Contemporary Theater Company, 327 Main St., Wakefield. Thu (12/10, 12/17), Fri (12/11, 12/18), Sat (12/12, 12/19) 7pm, Sun (12/13, 12/20) 2pm, 2h30m including 10-minute intermission. Refreshments available including beer and wine. Box office: 401-218-0282. Web site: https://app.arts-people.com/index.php?ticketing=tctc Facebook event: https://www.facebook.com/events/434273223440556/ Ticket sales: https://app.arts-people.com/index.php?actions=4&p=3