Winter Solstice 

Reviewed by Katie Buenneke 
City Garage Theatre 
Through November 25 

It is abundantly clear that Roland Schimmelpfenig, the playwright of Winter Solstice, currently making its West Coast debut at City Garage in Santa Monica, wishes he were a novelist, or perhaps an experimental filmmaker like the characters in the play. And the audience might be happier were Winter Solstice a book or movie — no one would be offended if you put down a book or left a movie theater. But there’s no way to escape this interminable two-hour play, without drawing the attention of the actors on stage, who would be able to see you leave.

So the audience is stuck in the world of Winter Solstice as time creeps by at a snail’s pace. The play centers on a liberal, upper-middle-class family, the type of people Noah Baumbach makes movies about. Everyone’s discontent in their own predictable way. Bettina (Natasha St. Clair-Johnson), a filmmaker, resents Albert (Taylor Lee Marr), her writer husband, for not being manly enough, and they’re both cheating on each other. She’s annoyed by her mother, Corinna (Geraldine Fuentes), and everyone snipes at each other in a manner found more often in plays, novels, and movies than in real life. Every minute of this Christmas Eve (which is not the winter solstice, but this isn’t the kind of play that’s bothered by facts or reality) is painstakingly and repetitively narrated by two figures (David E. Frank and Kat Johnston) whose purpose is nebulous at best. Their uncheerful evening is interrupted by the arrival of Rudolph (Troy Dunn), Corinna’s would-be suitor whom she met on the train earlier that night.

The writing is both pretentious and facile. It’s the kind of play wherein artists grandstand about the meaning of art, but each one’s art is an unsubtle explanation of who they are inside, which isn’t much different from who they are outside. The press materials and City Garage’s website refer to Rudolph as a “silken embodiment of a Nazi past Germany has long thought buried” — but the play purposefully obfuscates whether Rudolph is actually a Nazi, or if Albert just thinks he is because he’s been mixing his meds with wine. I was worried about seeing a play about Nazis the same day as a mass shooting at a synagogue, but the play seems to suggest that people who think Nazis are around us today are just “crazy!” This is deeply offensive on a number of levels. 

The deep flaws in the source material are exacerbated by the staging. Frederique Michel’s direction is halting, with the blocking often forced and unmotivated. The actors seem to move on certain beats because they’ve been instructed to, not because their characters need to. This awkwardness is compounded by an apparent lack of familiarity with the text, with a few fumbled lines at this performance a week after opening. This is despite the presence of two scripts onstage, held by the narrators, who themselves occasionally trip over their words (then again, how could they not, for they speak so often and so repetitively). Most of the performances are one-dimensional, save Dunn’s Rudolph, who shows a little complexity despite the text.

Winter Solstice wants to be a play that reminds us of the hidden threat of Nazism in today’s society. But after this weekend’s events and last year’s rally in Charlottesville, no one needs a reminder that anti-Semitism is alarmingly prevalent. Winter Solstice is trying to say something, but current events make the same point much more clearly.

City Garage Theatre, 2525 Michigan Ave., Santa Monica; Fri.-Sat., 8 p.m.; Sun., 4 p.m.; through Nov. 25. www.Citygarage.org; Running time: one hour and 50 minutes with no intermission.