'Seasons Greetings' spices up the holiday season

Anyone who has ever aspired to a Rockwellian Christmas celebration and failed (perhaps miserably) in the attempt, will appreciate “Season's Greetings,” Alan Ayckbourn's 1980 farce about a disastrous family get-together, in BJ Jones' crisp, funny revival for Northlight Theatre.

Ayckbourn's depiction of troubled relationships and long-simmering grievances aggravated by forced proximity and his portraits of detached husbands, drunken wives, desperate singles and dyspeptic patriarchs all feel familiar, almost as if the playwright eavesdropped on one of your family celebrations and then transposed your relatives' quirks and neuroses to the stage.

That combination of dysfunction, physical comedy, requisite sexual titillation and a dose of Chekhovian pathos places “Season's Greetings” as an alternative to the season's more reverent theatrical fare. The show has a certain appeal and it delivers laughs. But what really makes this B+ comedy worth seeing is Jones' grade-A cast.

Set in an upper-middle class burg in Great Britain, the action unfolds at the home of Belinda (the ever versatile Heidi Kettenring), charged with managing the holiday affairs, and her husband Neville (a nicely preoccupied Matt Schwader), who prefers tinkering with gadgets to making merry with family and friends spending the holidays with him and his wife.

Joining them are Neville's boozy sister Phyllis (Amy Carle) and her solicitous husband Bernard (Francis Guinan, in a deeply felt performance), a doctor of limited ability preoccupied with his annual puppet show, an unwelcome event which his family greets with indifference and derision.

The guest list also includes cranky, TV-obsessed Uncle Harvey (Rob Riley) along with Neville's former co-worker Eddie (John Byrnes) and his very pregnant, often overlooked wife Pattie (Maggie Kettering); and Belinda's sister Rachel, the Ayckbourn counterpart to Anton Chekhov's Masha, played by the terrific Ginger Lee McDermott, whose complex take on a wounded woman is one of the fine comedic performances elevating Northlight's production beyond the ordinary.

Things go awry with the arrival of Clive (Steve Haggard), Rachel's novelist friend from whom she wants more than a casual date. As for Clive, he's interested not in Rachel but in Belinda. Their mutual attraction results in an ill-fated tryst under the Christmas tree that proves to be anything but romantic.

Yet for all its silliness, Jones' production offers moments of genuine emotion. In fact, “Season's Greetings” transitions quite nimbly from comedy to tragedy. Case in point, the spectacular failure of Bernard's retelling of “Three Little Pigs” that occupies most of the second act and concludes with the erstwhile puppeteer confronting his own mediocrity. Kettenring also deserves mention for her savvy turn as a wife trying to convince herself that her marriage still amounts to something.

The festivities unfold on designer Keith Pitts' two-story set, bedecked with Christmas trees, wreathes and yards upon yards of garland, as if the trappings of the season might somehow inspire its sentiment in the revelers.