Emel Ertugrul stars in The Twelve Dates of Christmas, a co-production with Core Theatre Ensemble.
NORFOLK — Yes, “The Twelve Dates of Christmas” is X-rated — for a bit of naughty language — but the X on this shiny bauble of a play really stands for “Xmas.”
Most exciting to people who groove on Greek prefixes is that this one-woman play, starring Emel Ertugrul — an impressive stalwart of the Virginia Stage Company and the Core Theatre Ensemble — is meta all the way, standing beyond and reflecting on not one but two other Christmas chestnuts. The first: the VSC’s current “A Merry Little Christmas Carol,” with which it shares a set and runs in repertory. The second: the original “A Christmas Carol,” from which it largely derives. Thus it’s doubly meta.
Are you finding this confusing? Well, what’s the meta with you?
Before Facebook changed its name to Meta and the regrettable portmanteau word “metaverse” (for “meta universe”), literary critics threw about the prefix “meta” with abandon, latching it onto anything that, in Merriam-Webster’s words, seemed “cleverly self-referential.” So it goes here.
While “The Twelve Dates of Christmas” is contemporary in feel and appeal (and also references the hoary old song) the central character Mary — Ertugrul plays her and 12 others — happens to be a classic struggling New York actor who, while vacationing in her native Virginia (one fills in the state where the show is performed), spots her fiancé on camera at the Macy’s parade, sucking face with his co-worker.
The show follows Mary through her difficult but enlightening post-breakup year as she struggles to banish the ghost of her fiancé past and find happiness — with a dozen suitors, who turn out to be a dubious, soul-testing bunch.
All must be conjured by Ertugrul through narration, the kind in which she deftly steps in and out of voices and accents. This kind of play can be done by the actor’s racing from spot to spot onstage, laboriously delivering both sides of a conversation. Ertugrul, as directed by Laura Agudelo, also of Core Ensemble and frequently VSC, thankfully forgoes that shtick, more subtly suggesting the switches as needed. (Ertugrul’s glasses-wearing, interfering Aunt Kathy is particularly winsome with her Tidewater drawl.)
Playwright Ginna Hoben created and premiered this now one-woman show at American Shakespeare Center in Staunton before moving it to Manhattan Repertory Theatre and elsewhere. Hampton Roads’ Core Theatre Ensemble, and Ertugrul, is similarly peripatetic, having performed in Italy, Lithuania and all over this region. They often choose literary adaptations such as Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper” (a still-memorable hit, also starring Ertugrul).
Here, the mood is somewhat literary — in that Ertugrul’s character Mary is employed during her post-breakup year as Lady Macbeth and then as a familiar Dickensian figure. Mary explains the irony: “So, while I am trying to thwart the Christmas spirit, I get hired to be the Christmas spirit. Specifically, the Spirit of Christmas Past.”
But she and we the audience are mostly focused on her parade of suitors, which she describes as the “125 jackasses it takes to meet one decent man.” While not quite that many are depicted, they do deserve the comparison.
Mary has a one-night stand with good-looking Irishman Aidan O’Reilly, who says in parting, “The only thing I enjoyed more than your fine wit … is your fine (X-rated body part).” There are folks like Emil, a “One-Hit Wonder” who “unwittingly ruined himself with (her) by showing up in a Stars and Stripes fanny pack. God bless America!” There’s “Psycho Joe,” who activates an app on Mary’s phone to track and stalk her. And there’s Mr. Tim, the father of Mary’s co-actor, Tiny Tim, a 5-year-old heartthrob who easily beats out any adult for a place in her heart. Can you hear someone’s biological clock ticking?
Sometimes there are two suitors at a time. Mary takes to one, breaks things off with the other, and then the one she liked ghosts her.
With each suitor’s departure, she drops a Christmas tree ornament into a box and we hear a “ding.” (The original script has it the opposite — her hanging an ornament — but this way seems more appropriately ironic.)
Like all one-actor shows, this 90-minute, no-intermission show demands enormous, tour-de-force acting. Ertugrul, slightly restrained on opening night, seemed to be pacing herself for a dependably bravura run.
As a meta-member of the inspired-by-Dickens club of plays, “Twelve Dates” is not all jokes and raucousness. It conveys a modern but still Dickensian quest for finding oneself, which everyone hopes to do before life’s final chimes ring out our season on Earth. In that sense, this slightly racier-than-Dickens Christmas show also proves salvific.
In Mary’s words, “The best date I had all year involved a 5-year-old.” Christmas, after all, was started by and for a child.
Page Laws is dean emerita of the Nusbaum Honors College at Norfolk State University. prlaws@aya.yale.edu