From the Archives – “Holiday Memories”

Holiday Memories — 1992
Directed by Jerry Stropnicky
Adapted from Truman Capote
Jennie Gilrain, Susan Chase, Sam George (double cast with Sam Shipman), Mark McKenna, and Eric Beatty

One of the earliest productions by Touchstone to use an “outside director”, again Jerry Stropnicky, and be based on an “outside” or already existing text. We were becoming “like a real theatre”; and that was scary to me. Was Touchstone losing itself? This production, this script, is one of the sweetest holiday stories ever written. Full of the deep pleasures of the holidays, and the melancholy.  Wonderful pantomime, puppetry, poetic text, and ensemble work combine.  A great fit for Touchstone, and very well received by our audiences.

It, of course, tugs at my heart to look at it now, almost thirty years later.  Not just to see Jennie’s beloved Miss Sook, Mark’s mannered Capote-like narrator, and the entire ensemble at work, but this version features Buddy as played by Sam George, my son, at the age of twelve, with relaxed and beautiful expression.

— Bill George