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 UPDATE: Click for ALT review, December 15
Found on-line at the site for Austin High School's Red Dragon Players:
Our December offering is Alan Ayckbourn's Season's Greetings. It's a wonderfully clever play about a dysfunctional British Christmas.
This show, which features a nine-actor ensemble, concerns half a dozen friends and relatives who are celebrating Christmas at the home of Belinda and Neville. Squabbles -- some petty, others not so -- break out and lead to an apparent tragedy. As in all Ayckbourn plays, the humor is sometimes gentle, sometimes hilarious, yet always tempered with cynicsm and just a little darkness.
It runs two consecutive weeks, Thursday through Sunday (December 3, 4, 5 and 10, 11, 12). The curtain time for all shows is 7:00 p.m.
Tickets are $7. Seating is general admission; the house opens at 6:40 p.m. Those wishing to purchase tickets may call 414-7311.
 Comments by playwright Alan Ayckbourn about Season's Greetings, found at http://seasonsgreetings.alanayckbourn.net/:
"My late agent, the great eccentric Peggy Ramsay, hated me writing plays set at Christmas. 'Oh Alan,' she'd say, 'not another bloody Christmas play.' But I'd explain to her that Christmas was a gift to a dramatist. You're always looking for a reason to stick a group of people together who can't stand each other, aren't you? Dinner parties are good, but what better time than Christmas? You've got three days together and there's always bound to be at least a cousin no one can stand. I've seen it at my own Christmases - two relatives arguing bitterly over who should sit in which chair." (The Guardian, 20 December 2007)
" The family reunion, the pile of brightly wrapped presents; the log roaring in the grate; a children’s puppet show and a Boxing Day tea; turkey dinners; paper hats; crackers and streamers; around the base of the gaily decorated tree an extramarital relationship; a couple of stray gunshots in the hall. All the ingredients for a traditional English Christmas." (Alan Ayckbourn’s publicity note from the 1980 Stephen Joseph Theatre In The Round winter brochure)
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