25 Forest Ave
Portland, ME 04101
USA
VARIOUS DATES + TIMES – Multiple showtimes
The Tuna plays have always been a love letter to Texas written with a poisoned pen. Jaston Williams, Joe Sears, and Ed Howard wrote these plays in response to and reaction against the rise of the Moral Majority, a political organization associated with the Christian Right and the Republican Party founded in 1979 by Jerry Falwell, Senior. The Tuna Plays are fierce and funny satires of life in Texas and all around this country. They are brutal, and sadly, the targets that are mocked in these plays have only gotten a stronger foothold in both Texas and the United States. Like an American Chekhov– featuring flawed, sometimes truly horrible, funny human beings doing the best that they can and not succeeding.
Satire is one of the few places in our society where we can speak truth to power and laugh. From Aristophanes to Mark Twain, and Saturday Night Live to Last Week Tonight with John Oliver we delight in poking fun at the powerful and uncomfortable forces in our lives. A Tuna Christmas lives in this long tradition, and we encourage you to join us for to laugh, think, and contemplate whether Tuna, Texas of the 1990s is as far away from us as we think.