Holiday Ornaments From Truman Capote

Truman Capote’s bittersweet Christmas reminiscence, “A Christmas Memory,” adapted by Madeline Puzo as a staged reading, played seasonally at the Mark Taper Forum’s Sundays at the Itchey Foot literary cabaret from 1982 through 1990. Now this holiday tradition has been revived by the Pacific Resident Theatre in Venice in a production guaranteed to strum your heartstrings and send you groping for your handkerchief.

Michael Peretzian, who directed the Itchey Foot productions, presides over this strikingly simple and heartfelt staging, in which the actors sit on chairs and read from scripts, using limited props and blocking. Audrey Eisner’s Depression-era costumes and Kathi O’Donough’s lighting contribute subtly to the mood, as does xylophonist Erin Barnes playing David Johnson’s original music. It’s a minimalist approach that maximizes the impact of Capote’s beautifully rendered prose.

“One Christmas,” a short Capote piece adapted by Peretzian that played the final season at the Itchey Foot, has been incorporated here as a prelude to the more richly sentimental “Memory,” fleshing out what would otherwise have been a very brief program.

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In “One Christmas,” a young child of divorce, played by Michael Tulin, is shipped off to New Orleans to spend Christmas with the father he barely knows. Christopher Allport, alternating in the role with Matt McKenzie, plays the father, a dapper serial monogamist who specializes in wooing and wedding wealthy older women.

Anxious to break through his young son’s wall of reserve, the father resorts to a spectacular Christmas offering--a vivid green airplane with a red propeller that can be pedaled around like a bicycle. This gift, offered with flawed but yearning love, forever after symbolizes for the boy the father he will never truly know.

This acrid and sad opener cleanses the palate for the equally sad but far sweeter “Memory,” an alternately funny and elegiac illustration that family, especially at Christmastime, is where the heart is.

Reprising his role from the Itchey Foot, Tulin again plays Buddy, a young boy who has been dumped by his parents to be raised by relatives in the Deep South. What could have been a purgatory of isolation and boredom is rendered blissful by the boy’s “friend”--a simple-minded maiden aunt (Gretchen Oehler) with whom he embarks on a yearly odyssey to make dozens of fruitcakes, to be sent at their whim to acquaintances and admired public figures.

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Despite his reputation as a jet-setting, jaded urbanite, Capote was a genius at evoking the vivid and all-consuming minutiae of childhood. Oehler and Tulin bring a childlike straightforwardness to their portrayals. The pure interactions between the child and his childlike friend are funny, keenly painful and, ultimately, uplifting.

* “A Christmas Memory” and “One Christmas,” Pacific Resident Theatre, 705 1/2 Venice Blvd., Venice, today, Friday-Saturday Jan. 2-3, 8 p.m.; Sunday and Jan. 4, 3 p.m. Ends Jan. 4. $18. (213) 660-8587. Running time: 1 hour, 30 minutes.