The Long Christmas Ride Home is an Xmas play in the same sense that Die Hard is an Xmas movie. Sure, it takes place during the holiday season, but it has less to do with Santa Claus and O Holy Nights and it being a wonderful life and good tidings being brought than people firing at each other with high-caliber weaponry and everything going boom. Only in the case of Paula Vogel’s play, the high-caliber weapons are entirely verbal and the things going boom in explosive pyrotechnics are childhood senses of self, family, and beliefs.

As handled by the nimble Single Carrot company, the Ride is just that: an emotional roller-coaster trek through memory’s steep descents and the slow, arduous clank of climbing back up a hill that’s only going to jerk you around and send you spiraling toward bottom yet again. The play is structured as a flashback, as the young man Stephen recalls a singular Christmas where his sense of self—and his family’s sense of itself—irrevocably changed. Elliott Rauh plays the adult Stephen, but in his memory of the event, Rauh operates a Bunraku-style Japanese puppet version of his younger self. Amy Parochetti Patrick plays his older sister Rebecca and operates the puppet version of her younger self, and Britt Olsen-Ecker plays his younger sister Claire and operates the puppet version of her younger self. They’re all somewhat costume color-coded, and props get introduced with each one and reappear throughout the roughly 90-minute one-act play. It’s a narrative that moves with the dreamlike flow of the act of remembering, extremely specific in some details, foggy and inchoate in others, and with an ability to reassess, revisit, and recast moments for discussion and dissection.

In other words, Ride is a multilayered fabric, and everything—from words and phrases to thematic leitmotifs—has a polyphonous meaning. The Japanese puppetry has a narrative and emotional purpose, just as the titular trip—remembered as a car ride to the grandparents’ house for Christmas one year—is as much a description of that act as a subtle acknowledgment of the play’s hallucinatory path through time and space. This ride is the site of a traumatic event as well as an evocation of the long shadow it casts on each of the children’s lives when they grow up. Rebecca matures into a somewhat high-maintenance woman with commitment issues and strong feelings about not reproducing. Claire becomes a lesbian with volatile feelings about cheating. Stephen becomes a gay man living in San Francisco with a sincere appreciation of the Japanese love of beauty. And, the play suggests, how these adults became who they are is deeply rooted in this one dysfunctional family event.

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