Page 89 of Not Home Alone

MERRILY

I have never loved live theater or Grant or Joy or even that goddamn flake Harold so much in my life.

This is the exact opposite of a shitshow.

This is gold. This is going to reflect so well on The Christmas Barn.

We’re at Act Two, Scene Two, in The Kingdom of Sweets. The stage direction in the script says: The kingdom. It is beautiful. Do your best.

The Narrator says, “The Kingdom of Sweets was a magical land where everything was wonderful and nobody had homework. Ever.” Half of the audience recites the lines with her. It’s glorious. She pretends to read from the script. “It says here to pay attention to this next part. To the sets and the lights and the costumes, which hopefully everyone worked very hard on. Also, to Clara and the Nutcracker Prince. Just pay attention to everything, dear audience. Life is precious. This moment is important.”

M.E. Blossom was a genius, I tell you.

But I’m very proud of my concept for the set design for the kingdom. It consists of six painted king-size bedsheets that are hung from curtain wires so they part in the middle and fall back into place. There are three overlapping layers, giving the effect of depth and density. It’s like looking into a painted forest, each sheet with its own color palette. April did an incredible job with the details of the gingerbread castle and candied trees.

Our lighting director, Mr. Henderson, made magic happen too. I asked him to fit hand-cut gobos into several stage lights—cardboard inserts with patterns cut into them. We have pine trees and bare branches and snowflakes. Colored gels behind them tint the colors of the projected patterns. The patterns shift and ripple across the moving sheets. It’s a gorgeous effect, and my heart is bursting in my chest because of all the ooohing and ahhhing from the audience.

This is why I love live theater.

Grant and I, as Clara and the Nutcracker Prince, explore and push through the sheets, the lights and shadows moving over us and the sheets, as the residents of the kingdom wander around, performing vignettes. The Sugar Plum Fairy has a quirky monologue that suddenly veers off into a rant about winter. Two men in civil war costumes argue about whether or not pie should be eaten à la mode. Our little girl in the candy cane costume stands still for four minutes and she is excellent.

When we walk back the way we came, the sheets are pulled to the wings, as if they’re floating away and the kingdom only existed while we were in it.

In the final scene, it’s me and Grant center stage, back in the Stahlbaum parlor set. From the podium, the Narrator says, “It will be Christmas morning soon. Christmas Eve is nearly over, but it has delivered what Christmas Eve has always promised us: That magic is not dead. The Mouse King is dead. But magic isn’t. And that love—or something in the neighborhood of love, if it’s age-appropriate—exists. Magic, but also real. Hopefully, you paid attention to the previous moment, so you will know how to pay attention to the one coming up as well.”

“In a few hours, my mother will be making Christmas breakfast because the staff has the day off. She’ll burn the toast and eggs like she does every Christmas morning. It surprises her every time.”

Grant as the Prince says, “That sounds…”

“Ordinary?”

“I was going to say wonderful. I haven’t had an ordinary Christmas in a long time. I’d forgotten that ordinary and wonderful are sometimes the same thing.”

“Can I ask thee something, Prince?”

“Okay.”

“When I spoke to thee—when thou wert wood—did it help?”

“It’s the only thing that did.”

“My brother thought it was silly.”

“Your brother named all of his toy soldiers Gerald.”

“True.” I study him. The Nutcracker Prince and Grant Moody. Not trying to find someone inside of him anymore, because he’s all there. “I believed in you, you know?” It’s so interesting to me that the playwright chose to write the rest of the dialogue in plain, modern English. I choose to believe this was intentional. “Even before you transformed. Even when you were just a wooden doll in a cabinet. I looked at you, and I thought, there is someone in there who is trying very hard to still be there. And I thought, if that someone is trying so hard to be there, then the least I could do is try hard to believe he is.”

Grant pauses for the perfect thoughtful moment and says, “That’s what broke the curse, I think. Not the sword. Not the battle. That.”

“Believing?”

“You believed in me at Christmastime. When everything is cold and dark in midwinter. It’s very easy to not believe in anything. But you believed in me anyway. That’s what Christmas is, I think. Not the stockings. Not even the trees. Not the burnt toast. The anyway. You looked at something that nobody else thought had a soul and you chose to love it anyway. Some would call that innocence. I think it’s bravery.”

“It was brave of me, wasn’t it?”

“It was.”

And now, I’m about to do a small brave thing. On this stage, in front of everyone, I take a step toward Grant, just as we had choreographed it ten years ago. “Merry Christmas,” I say, as if I’m really saying I love you.