Chicago Sun Times
- Recommended
"...Set at the same dinner table over a span of 90 years, the play whizzes through a series of Christmases with multiple generations of the Bayard family. Children are born, parents (and not just parents) die, some family members move in, some move out. The same catchphrase might be repeated by a character several times, then repeated by others in memory of that character after they’ve passed. Family tales are shared, repeated, changed, questioned."
Chicago Reader
- Highly Recommended
"...hornton Wilder’s 1931 one-act, The Long Christmas Dinner, isn’t nearly as well known as the playwright’s Our Town. But it’s a gem that also, as in Wilder’s more famous play, looks at family ties, the fleeting nature of life, and the cycles of human relationships. (The play also has a local connection: Wilder wrote it while teaching at the University of Chicago.)"
Stage and Cinema
- Recommended
"...The Long Christmas Dinner is one of Wilder’s earlier plays, published a few years after he won his Literature Pulitzer for The Bridge of San Luis Rey, and seven years before he won the first of his two Drama Pulitzers for Our Town (such an underachiever was our Thornton). In many ways, The Long Christmas Dinner can be seen as a forerunner to that latter masterpiece, both in terms of its experimentation with structure as well as its themes."
Chicago Stage and Screen
- Highly Recommended
"...The strength of the play and this production is that I wanted to spend time with each character,
asking them more about their lives and views. Hooked and left wanting more, this is successful
theatre. I wonder that it is not produced more often. See it while you can."
Around The Town Chicago
- Recommended
"...Thornton Wilder’s “The Long Christmas Dinner”, directed by Jacqueline Stone, offers a sobering counterpoint to the usual cheer of the season. This is a play that telescopes ninety years of Christmas gatherings at the Bayard family house, using one long dining room table to chart births, marriages, and deaths. We see how loved ones fade—physically, mentally, and emotionally—and we see how children grow up and are incorporated into the family."
Buzz Center Stage
- Highly Recommended
"...Most impressive was the meticulous pacing and abundance of satisfying nuance director and TUTA co-artistic director, Jacqueline Stone, built into the production. She insured small gestures resonated with unexpected force and light touches of humor glittered brightly enough to make the project shine with warmth and contemporary flair."
Third Coast Review
- Highly Recommended
"...Thank god for TUTA Theatre and their production of Thornton Wilder's 1931 one-act The Long Christmas Dinner, directed by Jacqueline Stone in the company's first performance at the new Bramble Arts Loft. In this feel-bad Christmas-themed story we get so much of what holiday "entertainment" denies: characters with real flaws, lives altered by the forces of history, extreme emotions both positive and negative. And all of it presented by a cast of tremendous actors."
Chicago Theater and Arts
- Highly Recommended
"...The Long Christmas Dinner is like a river we have stepped into at some point. It was clearly flowing before we entered and it and its tributaries will continue to flow after we leave its shores."
NewCity Chicago
- Highly Recommended
"...Buddhism teaches that what causes suffering is the misperception that the world is a fixed thing to be clung to, rather than a continual process of change and becoming. As far as I know, Thornton Wilder wasn’t a Buddhist, but his existential humanism led him in a similar direction. This show brings that lesson home, with a lovely delicacy of touch."
