If awards were given for riffs and effects, Roland Schimmelpfennig’s Winter Solstice might just sweep the prizes.
A family of means gathers on Christmas Eve and bickers. The family has secrets soon to be revealed. An uninvited guest shows up. He isn’t who he seems. Narration/stage direction happens on stage. Characters take turns delivering narration/stage direction. Action switches between past and present. Action is always heightened. Action is comic…. until the dark turn takes hold.
It’s a lot for one play and that’s not even mentioning the two-hour intermission-less run time. Or the seating situation which is unbearably cramped for 50 percent of the audience.
And yet it would be a mistake to dwell on all this and not see this play and especially this production for its marvels.
In padding Winter Solstice with so damn much, Schimmelpfennig is playing a sly game with us. Distracting the audience with theatrical genres and narratives to hide the Trojan horse he’s wheeling in.
Married couple Albert (John Dunn) and Bettina (Adina Opalek) are reluctantly hosting Bettina’s mother Corina (Susan Koozin) for Christmas Eve dinner. Tensions are high as the unlikeable three bicker, push buttons and play defense with each other.
So, when the doorbell rings and Rudolph arrives (Spencer Plachy), a charming and sophisticated man Cornia met on the train, the couple puts aside their annoyance at the intrusion and invites him in for the evening.
At least it gives the group someone else to engage with as Albert’s friend Konrad (Alan Brinks) isn’t arriving until much later.
But as Corrina, Bettina and later Konrad become smitten with Rudolph’s piano playing and his rousing speeches about legacy, ancestry, beauty and aspiration, Albert becomes increasingly uncomfortable.
First of all, the man says he’s from Paraguay. Born there to German parents. Albert knows what that means. More importantly, as an author who writes historical books about the past haunting us, he sees in Rudolph’s pontifications strong winds of that oh so nefarious infamous ideology.
Rudolph never comes out as a Nazi per se, but Albert knows. The comments on the curvature of a nose disguised as a dissertation of the ideal of beauty. Suggesting that certain people are just bodies as opposed to humans. How the death of some serves man’s higher purpose.
So why doesn’t he do anything about it? Why does Albert simply look on in horror, popping pill after pill to try and numb the fear? Why is he so helpless in the face of what he knows is dangerously wrong? And how has this evil been let into the house without the others realizing it?
These are the uncomfortable questions that pour out of the Trojan belly in Schimmelpfennig’s play, questions as urgently prescient today as ever. Could we have gotten there without all the pomp, distraction, side narratives and stage time thrown at us? Perhaps. Or maybe we need to suffer a little to see the light.
If so, you couldn’t ask for a better production to take us there.
Directed with a strong sense of style by Bradley Michalakis, designed with Stefan Azizi’s trademark attractive and cleverly functional two-sided stage and performed with impressive gusto by the cast, we can’t help but be impressed at how the team rises to this challenging play.
In the end, we’re exhausted. The cast no doubt is exhausted. Half of us have had our knees mashed from less-than-ideal seating. And this probably isn’t a play we’re rushing out to see more than once.
If you’re game, however, a betting person will say it’s a show that’ll stick with you and grow in interest the more you think about it, revealing its gifts slowly over time. Haunting you the way the presence of pure evil haunts Albert. Asking you to think about your own resolve.
It may not be what you thought you wanted, but if this is the holiday present Rec Room wishes to give us, let’s say thank you and be glad for it.
Winter Solstice continues through December 14 at Rec Room Arts, 100 Jackson. For more information, visit recroomarts.org. $15-40.
This article appears in Jan 1 – Dec 31, 2024.
