`Tuna’ puts the white back into `White Christmas’

Meet Elmer Watkins of Klan 249. He’d like to invite you to the annual Christmas night and skeet shoot. And here’s Vera Carp, leader of the Smut Snatchers of the New Order. She’d like to eliminate the term “merry gentlemen” from the traditional Christmas song because it has undercurrents of homosexuality.

Welcome to Tuna, Texas, the setting for “A Tuna Christmas,” a holiday show that will put the white back in “White Christmas” for you. The two-man comedy is a spinoff of “Greater Tuna,” which was developed by Jaston Williams, Joe Sears and Ed Howard in 1981 and was the most produced play for two years in the late 1980s.

Last year, Northern Lights Theatre produced both the “Tuna” scripts and, last night, reprised a production of “A Christmas Tuna” at Penobscot Theatre. With the team of Kent McKusick (Northern Lights founder and artistic director) and Ron Adams, it’s no wonder the show can withstand a second coming.

It takes character actors the caliber of these guys to carry a show this twangy and small-townish. A little bit of this stuff goes a long way and if it weren’t for the quick-witted, intelligent performances of these two talented men, “Tuna” would be salad after the first half-hour.

Basically, this is humor of the sit-com variety. It’s fast and stereotypical, but generally rather funny when it gets wrapped around the 22 characterizations — nearly the entire population of Tuna — of McKusick and Adams.

There are poignant moments here, too. When the celeb announcer for Radio Station OKKK shares some holiday cheer and a dance with Bertha Bumiller, whose drunken husband has ruined nearly every Christmas, you get a full dose of the holiday spirit and what it does to people who have big hair and small bank accounts.

You may weary of the rural American wit of this show. But you won’t bore of the performances of the cross-dressing actors — although you may find yourself wondering just exactly how they make so many costumes changes so quickly. McKusick and Adams bring Tuna to Bangor, and turn it into an unforgettable brush with trailer trash, radar bangs and hearts that beat in an unmistakably red-blooded American way.

Northern Lights Theatre will present “A Tuna Christmas,” will be performed Thursday-Sunday through Dec. 2 at Penobscot Theatre in Bangor. For information and tickets, call 942-3333.