A Tru Holiday

Presented by Mockingbird Theatre

Dec. 19-23 at TPAC’s Johnson Theater

A Christmas Carol

Presented by Green Room Productions

Dec. 18-23 at the Darkhorse Theater

You know you’re in the South when the leading actors in your city are both preachers’ kids. Such is the case for David Alford and Mark Cabus, who hail from the Tennessee outposts of Adams and Johnson City, respectively, where theater for them began in their fathers’ pulpits. With Nashville as home base, each of these talented men has managed to carve out a show business career, extending their activities, at one time or the other, to New York, Los Angeles or wherever else their peripatetic profession has taken them.

Happily, both fellows will be home for Christmas, each performing local one-man shows that showcase their actorly gifts as well as their affection for some decidedly apropos holiday fare.

Alford heads up Mockingbird Theatre, a highly respected company that has been on hiatus of late, mostly because Alford’s been busy with films, including the Robert Redford vehicle The Last Castle and Colored Eggs, an independent feature shooting around Nashville presently and starring Tom Skerritt and Faye Dunaway. He’s also gearing up for Mockingbird’s February production of Of Mice and Men.

In the meantime, it’s Christmas, which for Alford means taking to the stage with his rendition of the poignant works of Truman Capote. Since 1996 Alford has regaled Nashville audiences with Capote’s A Christmas Memory, the author’s beloved nostalgia piece about holidays with his eccentric aunt, Miss Sook Faulk. This year, in a seasonal show dubbed A Tru Christmas, Alford will also perform Capote’s The Thanksgiving Visitor, a related story featuring the same characters.

Alford claims that The Thanksgiving Visitor is “chattier in tone. There are moments of lyricism too, but it’s a more active piece. There’s more movement onstage, as well as a five-piece band playing original music.” That music was scored by talented guitarist Paul Carrol Binkley, who, as in years past, will also be backing up Alford on A Christmas Memory.

Since Alford has performed Capote’s work before, he feels he has sufficiently come to grips with the right approach to the material, especially in light of the author’s very distinctive public persona. “I’ve toyed with the idea of doing more of a Capote impersonation...but Capote’s written voice is very different than the way he spoke. We wanted to come up with a voice that was more indicative of the style of writing, especially in A Christmas Memory. I ask the audience to buy that I am a storyteller, so even when I do slip into character, it’s more by way of suggesting.”

“The Capote pieces strike a personal chord,” he continues, “especially the character of Miss Sook. Anyone who’s ever had an older relative they were fond of instantly bonds with her...especially if that older person talked to you as a friend rather than as an authority figure.”

Of course, anyone who knows Alabama native Capote and his rather tortured and dissipated existence will note the sad irony in these elegiac pieces. “He’s remembering the only time in his life when he was loved,” Alford says. “Capote talks about the holidays warmly, but at the same time he acknowledges that this can be a very sad time, and that the childhood holiday fantasies and connections that we go through as kids can never quite be recaptured as adults.”

As in years past, Alford receives a directorial hand from Mockingbird’s Rene Copeland, but this will be the last time he performs the Capote pieces for the foreseeable future. “I’ve had a great run with it, and I don’t want it to get stale,” he says. “I really wanted to mount the Thanksgiving piece along with A Christmas Memory, just to see how that would change the audience’s perception. Then we’ll put it to bed for a while.”

As regards Mockingbird’s absence on the Nashville theater scene, Alford smiles. “Let’s just say we’ve been 'working out.’ We are healthier as an organization than we have ever been administratively, financially and spiritually.... We should finish the season in the black and eliminate the deficit that we’ve had.”

Mark Cabus also runs a theater company, albeit on a smaller scale. Green Room Productions functions as an occasional vehicle for the man who otherwise keeps pretty busy, thank you, performing for others. Cabus astonished Nashville audiences in 2000 with his portrayal of Oscar Wilde in Mockingbird Theatre’s production of Gross Indecency. He also collaborated this past season with Mockingbird in an ambitious adaptation of Shakespeare’s Henry V. For the New Year, he’s busy preparing for a lengthy performing gig on a cruise ship bound for the Far East.

In the meantime, for the third year running, Cabus and Green Room will present his one-man rendition of Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, a performance that threatens to attain cult classic status if he keeps at it long enough. “I love doing it, but it’s a little formidable to remember all the words,” he says with a laugh.

Indeed, Cabus does set himself a task, condensing the masterful Dickens’ 100-page story by half, then delivering his two-hour-plus adaptation as a performance of more than 30 characters. Cabus’ script, with a collaborative assist from Carolyn German, drew its inspiration from a 90-minute version he’d seen performed in Los Angeles by Patrick Stewart. “I had a good time with Stewart’s version, but it was disappointing a bit because there was no costuming and no lighting, really. And no sound. He was basically reading at a podium, and there was nothing very theatrical about it. I was expecting more, and that stuck in my head.”

Probably no actor in Nashville is better equipped to slip in and out of characters as diverse as Mr. Fezziwig, Tiny Tim and, of course, Ebenezer Scrooge himself. But Cabus also does a beautiful job of delivering Dickens’ narrative prose with the kind of feeling that reminds the listener that the novelist has few peers. “I’ve loved Dickens since I was a kid,” he says. “I’ve been taken with the sweep of his characters and plot lines. He does it so deftly.... I still think he’s the writer to beat.”

Dickens’ great depth offers the actor a constant challenge, even in so familiar a story as A Christmas Carol. “It’s very interesting to perform,” says Cabus. “It’s different every night—because of the audience or the way I feel. It’s evolved over the past three years.”

This year, Cabus is conscious of all that’s happened in the world, and he feels that the harsh realities of war form a natural impetus for stressing the sensibilities of the Dickens classic. “It’s hard to avoid seeing the 'God bless America’ signs everywhere,” he says. “I’m as patriotic as the next guy—and proud to be an American—but...I prefer 'God bless all of us,’ à la Tiny Tim. And so as we were working on the show, it was primary in our heads that this is a story of hope and redemption. For me, more than ever, it’s really important to do this show this year.”

It’s remarkable what Cabus does in this show, yet he genuinely refuses to take the credit. “People ask me, 'How much is Dickens and how much is you?’ I say: It’s all Dickens! It’s very modern and lovely and surprisingly funny. I couldn’t come up with anything that clever.”