theater

The Jewelry Box: A Christmas gift

Brian and Santa

The Christmas season is notorious for old chestnuts, like The Nutcracker and Dickens’ Christmas Carol, It’s a Wonderful Life and White Christmas. “Rudolf the Red-nosed Reindeer”. OMG. – Christmas carols. They may appear in radical and outlandish productions, but they always remain true to some vestige of their original version.

One thing all these familiar and often repeated performances share is a notion of the season’s meaning: the perseverance of human generosity and good will, despite the arbitrary cruelties and hardships of life.

If there is a local candidate for the status of classic Christmas stories, it is Brian Copeland’s The Jewelry Box. Currently playing at The Marsh in San Francisco, The Jewelry Box first appeared on stage in 2012. It is Copeland’s homage to his family and to his own six-year-old self, at the age when “you believe the world will be just.”

Opening the show Copeland draws the audience into the dream state of memory. Memories of Christmas. He has a very specific memory, made tangible in the description of a jewelry box, shiny in fake mahogany and lined in fake red velvet. It was something he spotted at the local emporium of dreams – White Front – near where his family lived in East Oakland. He is instantly smitten, believing that this jewelry box will make the perfect Christmas gift for his mother, who has lost her own jewelry box in the several moves the family had made in the previous year, from Ohio to Texas to Berkeley to Oakland.

The jewelry box costs a whopping $11.97. Problem: How is a six-year-old kid going to raise that astronomical amount of money in a household that struggles over every penny it earns?

Solving the problem becomes the performance. And through young Brian’s odyssey to earn the money to buy the gift, the audience meets a cast of characters that would turn Charles Dickens green (and red) with seasonal envy.

There’s his family with his strict and stalwart grandmother and high-minded but kind mother, his sister Tracie blurting out those embarrassing kid questions, his taciturn and violent father, and the selfish Willie Mae. And there are the neighbors, bad-tempered Mr. Winter and his sympathetic wife. And the desperate neighbor whose front door is removed from her family’s apartment for non-payment of rent.

Then there are the two ne’er-do-well but harmless alkies who hang out around the local Mom and Pop, swigging rotgut and arguing ceaselessly over sports events long played and vanished from most people’s memories. There’s the patient and nurturing schoolteacher Miss Kelsey, who carefully aids the young Brian without damaging his dignity or his pride.

Copeland plays all these characters unerringly, with subtle changes in voice and posture. We can even tell the difference between sister Tracie and young Brian. There’s just enough difference in delivery to separate the impetuous and naïve little girl from her determined and idealistic brother.

After watching young Brian perform a slew of jobs – passing out business cards for a used car dealer downtown, collecting pop bottles, helping grandma with her kitchen job at the convalescent home, and researching sports events for the alkies – we learn not only a lot about the determination of young Brian, but also about love in a vast variety of exchanges as the characters portrayed impede or aid the child in his mission.

It’s a touching and perfectly timed venture into memory and the meaning of the season.

– Jaime Robles

Brian Copeland’s The Jewelry Box continues at The Marsh Fridays and Saturdays until December 19. For information and tickets, visit themarsh.org or call 415-641-0235.

Photo: Brian Copeland and Santa. Courtesy the Copeland family