STAGE REVIEW : ‘Happytime Xmas’: Package Wrapped in Spite

The humbug in you will appreciate the spite unleashed around the wobbly looking family tree in “Happytime Xmas” at the Cast Theatre. Check your boughs of holly at the door. Don your gay apparel with spikes.

Playwright-director Justin Tanner’s love-hate affair with the American family emerged two years ago with his scabrous “Changing Channels,” which introduced two wickedly funny siblings, dotty Dottie and her hulking older brother, mean Drew. These original case studies in lower-middle-class American Gothic have returned in Tanner’s jaundiced ode to Yuletide, a co-production of the Cast and Open City Productions (which is concurrently staging, on the same set, Tanner’s late-night “Zombie Attack”).

Caroling away in the background of “Happytime Xmas” is the viperish theme of the force-feeding of Yule cheer. Tanner’s staging is calibrated along the lines of a shambles--to better capture a typical embattled family where the home is not a hearth.

But sometimes the production is a shambles. Not all the eight cast members seem comfortable with their roles, and some of those roles (especially the subsidiary ones) are ill-defined. What makes the production rewarding is the hilarious return of Andy Daley and Laurel Green in the Drew-Dottie, brother-sister roles they originated in “Changing Channels.”

The hysterical Dottie has stopped throwing up her food and is now a born-again Christian, sprouting angels’ wings and rewriting the Bethlehem story. Drew is as surly and sulky as ever, but now he’s got an intemperate pregnant wife (Mary Scheer) and he has just been fired.

All of them are leeching off the breadwinner (Rosemary Forsyth), a beleaguered single mother and waitress who’s strangely close to a bland younger woman (the pale Laura Skill) who hovers around like a shadow and barely says anything. Also hanging about, to no vibrant purpose, is Dottie’s angelic friend who comes to momentary life with a guitar vocal (Erika Ingersoll).

Into this scabrous nest arrives an interfering grandmother (Ruth M. Harrison) and, on Christmas Day, the mom’s jarring ex-husband (a jolly Harvey Perr in Santa togs).

The chief character is supposedly the harried mother, but the role lacks empathy and shape. Why her almost cruel indifference to daughter Dottie? And if her passive woman friend is her lover why not develop this relationship?

Tanner blows an important part of his tinctured comedy with the mother. We come to care less about whether she will give her family Christmas cheer or flee these halls decked in malice (and kitschy furniture under the set design of actor Daley).

In the meantime, Daley’s frowning Drew, guzzling a beer and glued to the TV set, is a wonderful new-born Scrooge. It’s on behalf of guys like this that you spell Christmas with an X.

At 804 N. El Centro Ave., Fridays and Saturdays, 8 p.m., Sundays, 7 p.m., runs indefinitely. Tickets: $10. (213) 462-0265--after 1 p.m.