HOLIDAY MEMORIES
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Truman Capote’s autobiographical stories “The Thanksgiving Visitor” and “A Christmas Memory” offer such reflection. Strange that the stories haven’t acquired the classic status bestowed on Dickens’s A Christmas Carol or even Dylan Thomas’s “A Child’s Christmas in Wales.” Perhaps the tastemakers think people would be uncomfortable with stories about the love between a sissy boy and his spinster aunt.
Certainly little Truman’s relatives thought there was something strange, even unhealthy, about his relationship with his elderly oddball cousin Sook. Truman was dumped in Monroeville, Alabama, to live with Sook, her two unmarried sisters, and their reclusive bachelor brother for a few years beginning in 1930; he soon forged a very close bond with Sook, a remarkable, almost saintly maiden in her 60s whose innocence and childlike nature led many people to think, wrongly, that she was mentally deficient. Some 20 years later he wrote about Sook and some key lessons he learned from her; in the 1960s, Frank Perry adapted the stories for film (Geraldine Page starred as Sook), but despite wide acclaim this version has generally faded from view. Now Northlight Theatre’s Russell Vandenbroucke is hoping that his story-theater adaptations will win an audience. They deserve to. Northlight’s Holiday Memories is touching, witty, and likely to put viewers in a mood to think back on their own bittersweet, instructive holiday memories.
