How to approach being in the audience for a production of A Tuna Christmas?  It’s not the same task for every audience member.  For some, no real instruction will be needed: The show is a quick-paced comedy, in which two energetic male actors embody 11 roles each. 

They will give you plenty to chuckle at as they nimbly embody an array of comic characters in the third-smallest (though fictional) town in Texas in the late 1980s, wringing what passes for Christmas cheer from their tiny, self-righteous aggrievements.

But some audience members could perhaps use an assist. After all, you’re about to watch a succession of nasty white people ride waves of spite and entitlement, spewing narrow-mindedness and xenophobia and occasionally barking orders to the few brown faces in their community (most or all with recognizably Latine’ names, and none featuring in the story except as faceless staff).

So, a little orientation may be helpful for Bag&Baggage‘s production of the show, which sold out so completely that they have held it over for an additional performance on December 22. 

A Tuna Christmas is the second in a series of comedic plays created in the 1980s by the show’s original two cast members, Jaston Williams and Joe Sears, and its original director, Ed Howard. The shows all are set in the fictional town of Tuna, Texas, a hotbed of small-mindedess of the sort promoted by what was then known as the Moral Majority. 

The shows’ creators knew that white Southern culture well, as all had sprung from it, and their clear intention was to poke fun. They toured with the plays for years, even giving command performances of Greater Tuna (the first in the series) and A Tuna Christmas for the first Bush White House. The original productions played to great success for many years, including on Broadway, and new productions like the one at Bag&Baggage continue to delight audiences.

Part of the appeal is the nimbleness the show requires of the two leads. Each plays a variety of roles of various ages and genders (though, it’s the ’80s, so we’re looking at a fairly narrow range of gender expression here). The characters vary widely in physicality, and I must say I was impressed by the range by Bag&Baggage’s two leads, Trevor Harter and Samuel Scott Campbell. 

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Harter is a convincing and even intermittently endearing housewife and official “Smut Snatcher” Bertha Bumiller (there will be no singing about “round young virgins” under her watch); a disc jockey at the local station (naturally dubbed OKKK); and Joe Bob Lipsey, resident drama queen and director of the town’s “troubled production” of A Christmas Carol. (“I haven’t had this many problems since the all-white production of Raisin in the Sun,” he moans.)

Campbell is especially memorable as Didi Snavely, the proprietor of a used weapons store (“If we can’t kill it, it’s immortal”); Bertha’s wayward son Stanley, fresh out of reform school, and also his self-righteous twin, Charlene; and Vera Carp, who clearly considers herself the biggest fish in the town’s small pond and has no intention of releasing her 14-year hold on the prize for the town’s Christmas Yard Display Contest. The two are charming as two waitresses and “aspiring career women” at the local Tastee Kreme.

The show is really a series of sketches, with an array of quick changes on Bag&Baggage’s compact stage. Don’t let the homemade aesthetic fool you; it suits the ’80s but demands inventiveness to assemble, disassemble, and reassemble. An off-kilter wig or hemline here and there suits the story, but the two actors and the backstage crew must navigate myriad costume and prop and scene changes with precision. 

Raquel Calderon’s costumes and Karen Wingard’s scenic and prop work are full of little touches that efficiently convey who we are with and where.  The changes in physicality are sometimes quite stark too; I was often struck by the contrasts each actor was able to embody, along with shifts in vocal tone. 

The shifts buoy the audience appreciation, as does the show’s biting humor. The insights here aren’t profound, but they aren’t shallow, either. The characterizations are shrewd, with details that convey bits of complication: Folks are fighting for and over such little prizes and bits of primacy, and the show also captures little heart wounds and bewilderment along with the meanness and petulance. You might feel appalled and sympathetic in the same moments. 

I wonder what it’s like to mount this show in these times. The cast and crew are definitely up to the task, making the most of what they can offer in a time of budgetary challenges that required the company to pivot. The show portrays a community scrambling in lean times and, although the play’s subjects are often nasty, the production doesn’t feel that way.  It manages–in part due to its two game leads and to good direction from Mandy Khoshnevisan — to hold it all with a sweetness that balances on the head of a pin. 

Is there something to be gained by embodying meanness and small-mindedness with a playful wink?  Possibly.  I hope we don’t forget that it’s still meanness, and leave a little space to wonder about it some.

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A Tuna Christmas

• Company: Bag&Baggage Productions
• Where: The Vault Theater, 350 E Main St, Hillsboro
• When: Continues through Dec. 22; many shows are sold out
• Ticket & schedule information: Here