TV Reviews : ‘Merry Christmas, Baby’: Powerful Journey Home

Robert Loggia, in a dangerous and challenging role, plays a disheveled, failed father who appears at his son’s doorstep after a 25-year absence on “Merry Christmas, Baby” in General Motors Playwrights Theatre on A&E; tonight at 6 and 10.

This again, following last month’s Revolutionary War drama “Hale the Hero,” is the kind of airtight, one-act drama that you can find only on cable’s Playwrights Theatre or the live stage.

The dramatic momentum spins off playwright Thomas Mitz’ rigorous unity of time, place and action--a Christmas Eve in a shabby apartment where an embattled son and father break through a lifetime of alienation. But it’s the execution, under veteran stage director Vivian Matalon, that gives this hour-long drama its pulse.

The three-member cast, abetted by tight camera angles and telling close-ups, captures the grit and marrow of real lives: Patrick Dempsey’s floundering son, Justine Bateman as his loving young wife at her wits-end, and Loggia, the father-from-Hell.

Loggia, bristly-bearded, homeless and speaking in a rusty, raspy voice that seems to emanate from the gutters of the damned, is almost unrecognizable. What catches you off-guard is the character’s wild-eyed gleam, his energy and his furious sense of mission. For the guilty father, an ex-jailbird and presumed long-dead, comes bearing a gift to his shocked, selfish and immature son--reconciliation and the possibility of redemption.

In the son, the biblical father sees himself, as in a cracked mirror. In absolution, the old man washes his sins, lifts a terrible burden and thus frees the youth.

All fathers--imperfect, complacent or delinquent--will be touched by this play. As hostess Lauren Bacall says to the viewing audience at the fade-out: “Perhaps sometimes we can go home again. Perhaps we can complete the journey.”