'A Christmas Story' is Acting Company's gift to Y-S

Director John Elliott deserves much praise for bringing an off-beat comedy featuring some fresh new talents to the fore in “A Christmas Story,” now playing at The Acting Company in Yuba City.

Some surprisingly good debuts are being made here, including those of Ted Hansen Crother as the young Ralphie and H.D. Whitson Jr. as the grown-up Ralph, whose poignant recollection of a childhood Christmas is the substance of the show, adapted from a short story by Jean Shepherd.

Crother is a good-looking young actor with talents he might want to exploit in future plays. He has an excellent sense of timing and uses facial expression well.

The stage “hero” is a tough role for young actors. They assume the focus is on them, which is not really the case. In plays, especially comedies, the hero is often merely a central device that allows supporting players to pull out all the stops in their portrayals.

That’s why good leading actors are such rare finds. They must be talented stars, yet generous enough to let their fellow actors also stand out. Both Crother and Whitson do that well in this show.

Whitson appears and disappears as the grown-up Ralph recalling his parents’ failure to tumble to his many hints that the only thing he wants for that long ago 1940s Christmas is a Red Ryder BB gun.

Whitson shows a lot of promise as an actor, but there are a couple of things he’ll have to learn - as will most of the other new actors in this show. One is they all must slow down their deliveries.

Talking too fast without enunciating each word precisely only muddies the words. That makes it difficult for the audience to follow the dialog. More attention in all community theater productions should be paid to diction, enunciation, tempo, elocution.

If the audience can’t hear the premise of a joke, it can’t get the punch line.

With Whitson, he was probably very excited by his first stage role and wanted to deliver his lines quickly. When he slowed down to play a drawling cowboy doing a Red Ryder commercial, his pace was about right.

Special notice should be given to Julian Barkley-Brinson (here’s a handy mnemonic device: The shortest actor has the longest name). He stays in character throughout and plays out his oatmeal and snowsuit sight gags well, thereby providing a number of good laughs.

Two time-tested actors, Bonnie Williams, who plays Ralphie’s mother, and Mark Johnson, who plays the father, turn in fine supporting performances.

An out-of-town visitor - a sharp-eyed person with a lot of stage savvy - and I differed on Johnson’s performance.

She thought he played the dad as too much of a bully. I thought she mistook his bumbling - as all fathers are compared to mothers - for bullying.

So, Mark, if you’re out there, you got one thumb up and one thumb down.

All the young actors were good. It’s not possible to list them all but Christian Torres as Schwartz and Aaron Hutton as Flick did yeoman’s work.

Emiliano Gomez was well-cast “against type” as the bully, Scut Farkas.

The two young women, Mary Navarro as Esther Jane, the girl with a crush on the oblivious Ralphie, and Hannah Payne as Helen, the precocious, brainy one in the class, were both touching.

One actor who should be encouraged to keep working is Kathleen Hansen, who plays Miss Shields, the school teacher.

In Hansen, Yuba-Sutter clearly has a magnificent new talent that needs to be promoted with larger roles. The other actors could learn from her clear, perfect delivery.

A couple points ought to be made. Even though many of the players spoke their lines too quickly, the play ran about 15 minutes longer than it should have.

The out-of-towner and I looked for refinements that might improve the play. One way might be to cut the Santa Claus scene, even though this is a Christmas tale.

The audience never sees Santa, anyway. He’s confined to an illogical outhouse-sized cubicle. With such an arrangement, how were parents going to take those awful pictures of the children sitting on Santa’s lap that mothers and grandmothers insist on showing to people who don’t care?

A little time could also have been saved if Ralphie’s revenge had been limited to three or four punches. In real life, the class bully would probably have succumbed in the emergency room from wounds sustained from the beating he gets here.

And my guest at the performance had a few choice comments about the BB gun.

“Many children in the audience would benefit from seeing more careful gun handling by making sure the barrel never was pointed near people,” she said afterward.

My only observation about the gun prop was limited to the fact that the compass supposedly embedded in the stock wasn’t really there. Neither was the little hole in the barrel where the BB came out.

All in all, however, this well-cast, sentimental play is a worthwhile diversion for the whole family this Christmas season. It should not be missed.

Award-winning journalist and author Tom Nadeau has written for and acted on stage, screen, radio and television. Write to him at theaterland@gmail.com.