In a family’s living room on Christmas Eve, Santa Claus mistakenly drops in on Janet, a Jewish mother in her forties. When he realizes his mistake and tries to hurry off to finish his rounds, she resorts to increasingly desperate tactics to keep him there as a sounding board for her problems and a salve for her loneliness. They transition from milk and cookies to fine wine to “your grandmother’s potato vodka,” and from suspicion to flirtation to violence, until Janet’s stream of dubious opinions and anecdotes eventually gives way to something closer to acceptance of reality.
Christmas Break won the one-act playwriting contest at Fredericton’s NotaBle Acts Theatre Festival in 2010 and was staged as part of the festival that year.
Keywords: Christmas, alcoholism, divorce, Jewish
Genre: Dark Comedy
Acts: 1
Run time: 45 minutes
Content note: contains strong language
Cast size: 2 actors
Male roles: 1
Female roles: 1