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Play Review Quarter 2 The Christmas Revels: Echoes of Thrace, is written by the Washington Revels, a D.C.

based theater group, and performed on December 7th at George Washington Universitys Lisner Auditorium. It is the latest in an annual Christmas show exploring Christmas celebrations and customs in different parts of the world and different time periods. This year, the company focuses on Christmas celebrations in the regions of Greece, Bulgaria, and Turkey, and has an indepth observation of customs there. Regardless of where the play is set, every annual performance is centered on music, dance, and audience involvement. Because the play is more about the customs and music of Thrace than a coherent storyline, there is no traditional theme in the form of a moral or a message. Rather, the smaller themes of the performance are Yuletide customs in that region. In that sense, the play does a very good job of representing the themes to their fullest extent, and includes music, dances, folklore, traditional parties, costumes, poetry, and characters from the era. Some of these traditions include Ignazhden, which is a pagan winter solstice celebrated alongside the feast of Saint Ignatius, and the Kamila, which is a group of boys dressed as a camel that runs around the town singing and causing mischief. The plot is similarly affected by the subject of the play, and because of it, is not a series of plot-driven events based on cause and effect. Rather, the plot is a series of seeming disparate, but related customs and. The one thing tying together the plot is a Poet, who comes on and off the stage at different times, explaining and introducing certain customs. Though there is not a conventional plot, there is a broad chain of events. The play opens with Orpheus, a musician playing softly on a hill. Then the entire village comes in and joins the carols. After that, the body

of the play commences, which is the village celebrating, singing, dancing, and displaying Thracian traditions. At the intermission, actors come out into the audience to invite them to sing and dance as well. Finally, after more stories are told and songs sung, the village gathers again to sing the final song, which is the Sussex Mummers Carol, which is not a Thracian song. This general format is followed by all of the Christmas plays by the Revels. The acting is also unconventional and hard to evaluate, because there is an incredibly large ensemble cast representing an entire village. In fact, it is very rare when there are less than ten to fifteen characters on stage. Many of them are musicians, singers, village children, and peasants. However, there are two types of characters who stand out. There is the Poet, portrayed by Morgan Duncan, who helps navigate the audience through the different traditions, and encourages them to join in songs. Like every character in the play, he has basically one emotion; happy. This prevents him from performing with engaging emotional subtext, but he makes up for that by entertaining and engaging the audience while connecting them to the play. Duncan does a good job of putting emotion into his words, and also interacting incredibly naturally, as if his lines are not rehearsed, but rather everyday conversation. Another group of actors that performs well are the Kallikantzaroi, or Christmas goblins, who come up once a year at night to cause shenanigans. Although they are portrayed by children like Lilly Baker, Gabrielle Cole, and Sonia Krishan, they commit to the role very well, and also must have thought about what the mindset of such a character would be in order to better represent it. Because music is so central to the play, it has a central role. The music director, Elizabeth Fulford, chose for most of the music to be traditional Thracian Christmas songs or songs for courtship. However, as it does every year, the play also includes some universal Christmas and religious songs, such as Lord of the Dance, Dona nobis pacem, and the Sussex Mummers

Carol. The music is put to good use to accentuate the mood and to help the audience understand what is going on. The set, designed by Colin Bills, is a small Thracian town used throughout the play, which helps put the audience in the action, as well as providing a glimpse of what a Thracian village might have looked like. The lighting, also by Bills, is used conventionally, but effectively, to indicate the mood, and also to put a spotlight on important characters in the scene. Rosemary Pardee, the costume design coordinator, enlisted the help of people with Thracian roots to help find out what people in that region wore. She makes use of that information well, to create accurate costumes, even though some of them are very large and elaborate. The choreography by Christine Alexander is very smooth, and not only includes staging move in and around the set, but also the many dances they perform. The director Greg Lewis makes good use of the staging to indicate who to focus on and also where the action is. He puts the most important people near the front of the stage, and the action usually focuses on them. His artistic choice to use a disjointed plot line as well as have music and custom centered play makes it unconventional, but ultimately was very effective in portraying Christmas in Thrace.

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