Interview: Stars Of CityRep's A TUNA CHRISTMAS On The Southern-Fried Charm Of Their Special Holiday Show

CityRep is bringing back their much-adored show, A Tuna Christmas, to delight Oklahoma City audiences yet again. The stars of the show, Donald Jordan and Jonathan Beck Reed, checked in with BroadwayWorld before one of their rehearsals to share their favorite memories of past productions, the challenges of portraying so many characters in one play, and the heart-warming message of this new Christmas classic.

I've never seen any of the TUNA shows at all, so please tell me about this show... I know you have done them before, so why are you doing this one again?

JORDAN:

We did this one almost a decade ago, and then we did GREATER TUNA.

You did the Christmas show first?

JORDAN:

We did. It's the second one the guys wrote, but it's the first one we did. The plays have been a big part of both of our careers. Together and separately, we have done fifteen different productions. GREATER TUNA was the first big hit of my career. I was in the first production in Texas after Joe and Jaston had toured through. At that time, it was the longest running show in Fort Worth, and I was named actor of the year. Jonathan was up here doing the first production in Oklahoma. We were talking about how we dreamed we would do it together, we just didn't realize it would be 30 years later!

REED:

We came really close in New York-

JORDAN:

-That's right.

REED:

At the Gateway Playhouse we did BIG RIVER and the New York Times came out to review it. Fortunately we got very good reviews, so the producer of the theater said "We want to put you two in something together because you did well for us in this. Any shows you're interested in doing together?" Right away, we said GREATER TUNA!

JORDAN:

The producer John Hodge, born and bred in Long Island, said "Those plays are so cartoony!" And we said "John, all those people come to my house at Thanksgiving! Everybody in that play is not only real, they are all related to me."

REED:

He still wasn't sure if people would come out to Long Island...This was in 1989. The show was only Off-Broadway six years before that. And the original production was a huge hit; it ran Off-Broadway for several years. It was kind of a runaway hit...no one expected it to be. It took New York by storm. I went and saw it twice when I first moved to New York, and you couldn't get a ticket. It was like Hamilton today, only off-Broadway at Circle Rep-a smaller venue-it was great, a huge success.

JORDAN:

Just a year or two after that A TUNA CHRISTMAS played on Broadway. By that time the show was so popular they took it directly to Broadway. It got a Tony nomination.

REED:

They enlarged it. The set was bigger, more elaborate-

JORDAN:

-But the heart of it is very simple. And I think in this world of electronic media where you can really believe that you're walking on Mars, or that a guy has wings popping out of his back, or can shoot laser beams out of his eyes...because you can do anything with CGI and it's amazing-

REED:

-You can even do it on stage now.

JORDAN:

There is a fundamental excitement and joy that you share between the cast and the audience: the element of spectacle of the human imagination. Because they know, on some level, that there are only two of us, and we just walked off and came back on as a whole different person. We each play ten different people, and have more than twenty costume changes a piece in the show. It really is a theatrical, exciting venture. And then, I think it has a particular resonance in this part of the country, like we said, because we all know these folks. Both GREATER TUNA and A TUNA CHRISTMAS were among the most-produced plays in America for quite a long time, in the 80s and 90s. And they are still frequently produced even now.

This is one of the few productions that CityRep has brought back multiple times. Tell me why? Obviously it's a big hit with your audiences...

JORDAN:

Most of the focus of our theater over the past fifteen years has been world, regional, state, or city premieres. Like most regional theaters, we are focused on presenting part of the dialogue that's going on in the national professional regional theater scene. But this play is head-and-shoulders the most popular show in our theater's history. Every single year this is the most requested show from our patrons.

REED:

It's actually surprised us a little bit, that it's been so requested.

JORDAN:

You think "Well, they had a good time, they remembered it." But no, year after year... after year after year after year!

REED:

I just think it's unpretentious; anybody can come see it and enjoy it. You don't have to have a theatrical vocabulary, or previous experience going to see shows. Everybody can sit down in the audience; it's kind of an event show.

JORDAN:

They loved our GREATER TUNA, which we just did a few years ago again, because they kept asking and asking. We had never done that one here, but Jonathan and I had both done it in separate productions, and it set our theater's all-time box office record for a single production. Which we hope we are on the way to breaking with this production! And we moved it to the Freede Theatre this year from the CitySpace black box where we had done it originally. Part of the reason we moved it up here is so we can accommodate everyone who wants to see it, and the flipside of that is, hopefully everybody who wants to see it will hurry up and buy a ticket!

REED:

We have, in the past, with this particular show had to turn people away. We even added a show last time-

JORDAN:

-We added shows down in the basement because, you know, that's a lovely intimate theater- we built it-but there's not a lot of places to sneak in any more chairs. We were sold out. We did 15 performances down there and they were sold out from beginning to end. The second and third years, we added performances during the week. If you want to talk about two tired-looking actors! We had Thursday night, Friday night, two on Saturday, two on Sunday, we added a couple of Wednesday nights. And you know, this show is about three shows worth of work. If you were playing a normal Broadway show you might have 30 pages of dialogue. Well, we each have 50 pages, single-spaced, just to memorize, plus all those costume changes.

Plus you're doing two show days which are always more exhausting too. So you're doing a Broadway run, but you also have "real people jobs" because this is Oklahoma.

REED:

Right, I own a studio that I have to run.

JORDAN:

My day job... I work for an ogre, because it's me. [laughter] I have to go do all the other theater stuff as the artistic director because that doesn't stop.

REED:

It's exhausting. I'll tell you what's really exhausting too, is the vocal aspect of the show. Because all of the characters have different voices. Some are loud, some are quiet...some are male, female. We talk so much; it's a very verbal show. That's one of the wonderful things about it-it's very well written, very tight.

JORDAN:

Because Joe and Jaston are from this part of the country, different idioms... the phrases, the rhythms... (Original stars and authors of the play) Joe is a pretty good friend of mine, and Jonathan knows Jaston very well from the other productions he's done. Everything might seem larger than life, but it's real. "Everything's bigger in Texas" -they aren't larger than life, these characters are life-size. Life-size like we know in this part of the country.

REED:

I also think one of the appeals in Oklahoma particularly-and I've done it in Texas and Oklahoma-is that these are Texans.

JORDAN:

I agree with that. I've done it in both places, and Oklahomans like laughing at Texans.

REED:

And Texans love laughing at the people they recognize! Of course if you ask them they would say "That's not me!"

JORDAN:

"No, no! That's my twin brother, but that's not me!"

REED:

There's kind of that rivalry between Texas and Oklahoma. And in truth, Joe is from Oklahoma. He lives in Bartlesville. So these characters, you know them. You've met them, you're probably related to some of them...

JORDAN:

You might be one or two of them! You never know. You hear something come out of your mouth in the play you go "Oh! that's awfully familiar."

With all the switching characters so much, how do you get into character? Is it a posture that gets you in? A voice? It might be different for each character, but what clicks you in?

REED:

It's a posture first for me first and then it's a voice.

JORDAN:

And it's the inverted order for me.I kind of need to know how they talk and where it's placed and then I add onto that.

REED:

In order to become these characters-you only have 15 seconds to totally transform yourself from being a little kid to being an old woman. And for me, I had to figure out, "who do I know who are like these people?" Who do I know well enough that I can, sort of, imagine myself to be them and adopt some of their mannerisms and vocal characteristics? I told people "That's my brother when he was in his teens" and my brother is like "I don't do that! That's not me!"

JORDAN:

Each one kind of has a physical thing-either she walks with her hands here, which I stole from an old waitress, or she's bent over kind of like my mom, or has a tremor in one hand like one of my aunts. One of them is just like my uncle... kind of a blowhard; I sound like my uncle when I do that. I find how they sound and then I add to each one...she has more of a bounce in her hips. He's a sheriff and walks like my old high school football coach-a big tough guy, he has that kind of John Wayne walk. Each one of them is a little different.

REED:

I sketch them, because I'm an artist-

JORDAN:

-He's a great artist.

REED:

One of my first things is, I will doodle. I'll think "What does this guy look like?" and I'll sketch him out. Then once I sketch them, I see the physical mannerisms and I try to emulate those. For me a lot if it's a physicalization. I start from both the inside and the outside, and hopefully at some point those two merge.

JORDAN:

There are a lot of challenges, like you said. Not only do you have to use your whole vocal range because you're doing men and women, younger and older-you're trying to color on that-but you only have your 2 1/2 octaves. And you can't use a certain amount of your technical facility... None of them have a French accent. Nobody's talking like a pirate - they're all from the same little town, they all have the same regionalisms, but then you find colors within the regionalism. I even find certain words that I consciously pronounce differently. Somebody says coyote and somebody says coyotEE. Just so they sound like different people, even though they are very similar in a lot of ways.

REED:

That's the challenge. In the last few years, I've played more British characters than American ones: Fagin, Henry Higgins, Mr. Banks, Scrooge...and in playing them, they're all very different. It's easy to come up with different voices and sounds for all of those. But when you're playing everybody from the same town-

JORDAN:

-Yeah, and some of them are related! I make some choices for them, vocally where they are supposed to be a little similar. Some of these characters need to remind you of other characters. because they are actually related with in the world of the play. So there are a lot of subtle technical choices that go into it. And if we do all of that right, the audience doesn't think about any of it.

REED:

Once they merge, then it's sort of like channeling somebody else when it all comes together. And that's a weird thing for me-I have this moment right before I go on stage where I feel like I'm another person. Not like an actor playing another person, but also not like a psychotic person-

JORDAN:

-Well we're not sure about that last part...

REED:

I feel like the soul of another person is inside me. Now, I can control and manipulate it-and laugh when something goes wrong-so I'm not ready for the nursing home yet! It's like everything disappears and you're just this other person. It's especially true in the show where you're playing so many characters.

JORDAN:

I'm going to embarrass Jonathan now. Because we've done about 50 projects together: college, touring around the world, 48 states, three countries, two continents... we've really had a very fortunate chance to spend a career together. We dreamed about that together when we were kids in college. And I will say that, out of all of the Oscar, Tony, and Emmy winners and people I've worked with, Jonathan remains the finest actor that I've ever been on stage with. He says that thing about channeling - that's really true. There are sometimes you can look at him and go "I know that's Jonny, but somebody else is in the house right now." Very, very fine actor. And it's a joy-doubly so with this play-because there's no adult supervision. Steve Emerson is our director, and he runs a good tight ship in rehearsals and tries to get us to behave. But once the play starts, there's nobody left on stage but us.

REED:

Steve didn't direct our very first production, but he took over the second and third years, and it's been great because, not only is he a terrific director, he's a friend. And so we can actually have a conversation about things and we're not dictated to.

JORDAN:

And he knows these characters as well as we do.

REED:

And he sees new things which is great. As an actor-especially if you do a role over and over-you evolve as you grow up...you understand the world better. You get older and you understand things from a different perspective. And that's what Steve does, he sees it, and he notices things that we are not even aware of - which is what any good director does. And then he will point out certain things...he will give a note and say "You know, what if you did this?" And then I'm thinking "Wow! that would be awesome! That makes great sense." It's really wonderful to have somebody like Steve who we are so close to...he's such a great guy, and understanding all the dynamics-the comedy and the drama-because this isn't just a comedy. What really makes the comedy - if something is two hours and all you're doing is laughing, if you can't find the heart of the characters, then nobody cares.

JORDAN:

You want to layer that texture. The script is so rich comically that you want to also find those grace notes that are real, poignant, and touching. It's not four-and-a-half hours of Tuna Chekhov, but you land on them and then you move on. They're sweet, they're touching, and then it pays off and makes for a rewarding story.

REED:

It makes it real and makes it touching.

JORDAN:

And that's the best kind of comedy. The comedy when people relate to the human experience.

REED:

You could go too far and too deep. You need to know where that fine line is, and Steve knows: he sees that.

JORDAN:

And he's also remarkably technically.

REED:

And he's a great actor.

JORDAN:

Because this place seems relatively simple - there's no turntable or twelve sets - but it's incredibly complex, like NOISES OFF, as a piece of mechanics. Because this set changes while this recording has to happen. And this voice has to take just so long while he changes costumes and comes on as this new character who has to move that prop - it has a whole technical construction. It's intricate, and so you have to be aware of all those details. You can't just be "You guys go off and take care of that"

REED:

And it can never show...It's got to look like it's just flowing, easy.

JORDAN:

Like Spencer Tracy said, "You can't let them catch you at it."

REED:

That's what makes the show charming.

JORDAN:

One of my favorite compliments that we got when we were downstairs, we would come out in the lobby after the show and wish everybody a Merry Christmas, and so often people would say "Where's the rest of the cast? We want to tell them all!"

REED:

We were collecting money for Broadway Cares / Equity Fights AIDS, which we do every year, and so after the show we would stand out in the hallway with our bags if they wanted to put any money in. It was so strange - "Are they coming out? We want to meet so-and-so!"

JORDAN:

It was hilarious. The first time, I didn't know what to say-

REED:

-Are they joking?

JORDAN:

And no, they were very sincere. The audience just loves this one. They come back again and again. It is a large and challenging role. Like Joe and Jaston, we won't be able to do them for the audience for ever, so it's really nice when we get a chance-

REED:

-We May not be able to get through this show -

JORDAN:

-Yeah there may be an oxygen tank off stage-

REED:

-I got sick last week-

JORDAN:

-Because there's no rest in it. There's no time when you go "I'm so glad I'm not in this number. I'm so glad I'm not in the scene. I can run backstage and get a glass of water" There's not that.

Once you're on the train -

JORDAN:

Yeah, that's it, it just goes.

REED:

Boy, it goes. It's like athletics, it really is. So much of it the physicality of it, and the basic logistics. Getting from Point A to Point B backstage. You give yourself up to the dressers, which those people...they are amazing, just extraordinary.

JORDAN:

It takes three times as many people backstage to make this play work for the two of us onstage. And you can't do it without them.

REED:

And they rarely get credit, but they are the unsung heroes of the show. There would be no show - we could not possibly change on our own. And they keep track of everything: they've got lists of when we come on, and they tell us what to do, so we are able to move on and make that 22nd costume change.

JORDAN:

It's a little like that stage of your life when you're really messy teenager, you constantly just rip your clothes off, throw them on the floor, and off you go to the next thing, and you come back and "mom" (in the form of a whole gang of dressers) neatly moved the to the next place and they're all waiting for you in the right order. Because you have to put them on in a certain way because you only have about 20 seconds. If only I could have them follow me around my whole life..."File this! Take care of that! Send that off!" It would be great!

So, the last thing, because I know you guys have to rehearse, you said this is requested by a lot of audiences - audiences who seen it before, who want to come back and revisit it. What about someone who's never seen it before? What would you say to them?

JORDAN:

It's the perfect Christmas show, especially in our part of the country. In our part of the country, It's charming, it has a Christmas spirit, but it's hilariously funny. It's laugh-out-loud funny. So it's a wonderful holiday treat. I think that's why our audience loves this one most of all because it combines the great comedy and the charming theatricality of the device, and then you lay on top the sweet holiday spirit, and all of those things together just make it an irresistible theatrical evening.

REED:

I would go back to what I said before, it appeals to everybody. It's not pretentious at all.

JORDAN:

Everybody comes and has a good time.

REED:

It's the kind of show where you can eat peanuts and throw them on the floor-I mean, I hope they don't-but it's that kind of a show. It's easy to watch; it's easy to like.

JORDAN:

It's a fun time. You can come and have a good time, and at the holiday season that's kind of what people want to do. There are traditional things that you do you do with your kids, you take them to THE NUTCRACKER, A CHRISTMAS CAROL. This is something that's a little more offbeat, it's kind of fun for everybody who's been to THE NUTCRACKER and already seen A CHRISTMAS CAROL. "I want something a little different, I want a different flavor this year."

REED:

GREATER TUNA was beautifully constructed, but it was more vignettes of characters-you got to see a little slice of a character. This is more of a story... this actually has a very warm heart. You see them coming together...

JORDAN:

It has a real arc, and it actually doesn't pay off until the very final moments.

REED:

So it's lovely-

JORDAN:

-And funny!

REED:

It's Christmas. It's got a wonderful warm heart. It's very much in the spirit of the season.

A TUNA CHRISTMAS runs December 1st - 18th at the Freede Little Theatre in the Civic Center Music Hall. Click here for tickets.

A TUNA CHRISTMAS
Presented by Oklahoma City Repertory Theatre; written by Joe Sears and Jaston Williams; starring Jonathan Beck Reed and Donald Jordan; directed by Steve Emerson.

Photo Credit: Wendy Mutz, Mutz Photography.

This interview has been edited and condensed.

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