“I’ll Be Home for Kahless: The Hallmark Parody of the Season!” from the new Just Us Theater company asks the age old holiday question, “What if you dropped a bunch of Klingons into the middle of a Hallmark Christmas movie?” The answer, quite surprisingly, is that they fit right in.
“You’re just in time for my favorite story!”
After the Klingons invaded Dickensian England (with “A Klingon Christmas Carol”) and Bedford Falls (with “It’s An Honorable Life”), it was perhaps inevitable that the new niche genre of Klingon holiday plays would next venture into Hallmark movie territory. But it’s kind of hilarious how little adjustment is needed to the standard Hallmark movie formula to accommodate a Klingon as our romantic protagonist.
“You kill your meat before you eat it? That is inefficient.”
A high-powered career woman visits a small town during the holiday season and not only discovers the meaning of Christmas, but also learns what that nagging feeling that she was missing something in her life was all about - finding true love with a hunky but still emotionally vulnerable small town guy. Oh, and along the way she also finds away to save the small town/family business with her particular set of skills and connections.
You can run right down that holiday movie checklist:
Narrator? check;
lovable parents and townspeople? check;
carolers? check;
adorable montages of the town’s holiday festival, learning to ice skate, and holiday baking? check, check and check;
tragic backstory for hunky small town guy? check;
random out of nowhere exposition dumps? check;
best friends of the central couple checking up on their pals to help them find love? check;
a lie that nearly derails the couple’s chance at happiness? check;
big reveals that turn out not to be the big reveals you thought they were? check;
unexpected happy ending that strangely kind of makes perfect sense? check.
Here our high-powered career woman is Samantha (Dawn Krosnowski), a Klingon leader of her fellow warriors, including best friend Mel (Alison Anderson). Samantha makes her mother The General (Lana Rosario) so proud that she allows Samantha a month’s leave to go to Earth and spend some time among the humans to see if she can get this vague dissatisfaction that there must be something more to life (than war) out of her system.
“What are toys?”
“Small weapons that do no damage.”
Samantha goes to Painesville, Minnesota because… well, Pain is the in the name, I guess. Also, she’s heard that people are passive aggressive in Minnesota and figures it must be some kind of alternative battle strategy. She stays at the Welcome Inn, where friendly proprietors Pat (Tim Uren) and Cynthia (Sarah Broude) run the place with the help of their bearded, flannel-wearing adult son Jeff (Samuel Poppen), who’s back home because… well, we don’t talk about his tragic backstory right away. Samantha is, of course, not as good at fitting in as she thinks she is (the bangs hiding her bumpy Klingon forehead don’t also imbue her with perfect social skills). But everyone just thinks she’s quirky and strangely adorable, so Samantha fits in well enough to let the various Christmas montages, and multiple near-kisses with Jeff, begin in earnest.
“Are there any more children for us to defeat?”
Samantha’s mom the General sends her Number 2 (Jared Reise) over to Earth as well, disguised as Santa Claus so he’ll blend in, to try and keep an eye on her daughter. Mel drops in to check on her friend as well. And a couple of landing parties of other Klingons stop by on occasion at the ice skating rink or ice sculpture competition to test that Samantha’s warrior skills aren’t getting rusty, to the assorted townspeople’s confused delight. These assorted Klingons and townspeople are portrayed in various turns by Gillian Chan, Mickaylee Shaughnessy, and Laura Thurston, with additional support from Jeff’s childhood friend Molly (Alexandria Turner), who approves of Jeff’s odd new love interest, and Mayor Lindstrom (Stefanie Fauth), who keeps finding herself presiding over Christmas festival events that turn into a bunch of people wielding knives that appear out of nowhere (staged with gusto by fight director Jena Young).
“A feeling she had previously known only in the heat of battle…”
One of the many charming virtues of “I’ll Be Home For Kahless” is that it’s not trying to be a movie or a TV show - it tweaks and lampoons the conventions of those genres, but it is very much a stage play, and proudly plays into all the things that live theater is good at. Primary example of this, it fully engages the audience as a collaborator in the story. I’m not talking about the thing many folks dread, audience participation - though, if you want to sing along to some Christmas music or let out a lusty cry of “We are Klingons!” in the original Klingon language, you can certainly join in with the ensemble.
“Where I come from, what you are wearing is very dangerous attire.”
No, I mean the production engages the audience’s imagination and suspension of disbelief, even as it also draws attention to the artifice of the staging. Jeff’s mother tells him to put a log on the fire and come say hi to their new guest. There isn’t a real fireplace to put a log in, so Jeff just tosses a log at the picture of a roaring fire and lets it bounce off the wall as he walks away. A (fake) actor who was scheduled to play the narrator’s sidekick Twinkles the Elf has refused to go on, so the production enlists the reluctant help of their disgruntled “backstage assistant stage manager” (Nathan Gerber) who throughout the rest of the show does the absolute bare minimum to fill in where the other actor would have been, refusing to fully get in costume (or remove his headset), tossing handfuls of fake snow unenthusiastically into the air, spraying random holiday scents haphazardly around, refusing for a second to blend into the ensemble.
“Wow, you must take a lot of self-defense classes.”
And if you’re concerned, “Oh no, I’m going to be forced to read a screen of subtitles all night whenever there’s a Klingon on stage” don’t worry, the production has a solution for that, too. Yes, we open on Klingons in battle, accompanied by supertitles on a screen above the stage (Klingon translations by Laura Thurston). But the play quickly ships Samantha off to earthbound Minnesota, so she’s forced to speak in her amusing attempt at English as part of her awkward disguise. And partway into the play, the Narrator (Edwin Strout) whips out what he calls a universal translator, points his remote control at Samantha and her friend Mel and zaps them into speaking English for the audience’s benefit. But the production keeps the fourth wall intact, and all the characters onstage listening to Samantha and Mel’s conversation look at the women like there’s something wrong with them - because the good people of Painesville are still hearing Samantha and Mel speaking to each other in Klingon. It’s a little thing, but it’s a nice touch, and very funny. That attention to detail - and humor - is everywhere in playwright Angela Fox’s script and musical compositions.
“Her rage will be mightier than a thousand tribbles.”
Strout’s Narrator is great for fleshing out the world of the play, painting a picture with his words that the simple staging couldn’t possibly afford to do in the space of the Phoenix Theater - just like they’ve been doing since Shakespeare was first at the Old Globe. The narrator also serves to focus the audience’s attention on certain elements of the wide stage, the same way a camera in a Hallmark movie would zoom in on the two lovers about to have that firs kiss. At the same time, the play makes comic hay out of the fact that sometimes narration in Hallmark (or any) Christmas movies can be a bit intrusive, telling us things we can clearly see for ourselves - at which point the narrator will roll his eyes and say aloud, “Oh why am I still taking right now? Why am I even here?”
“It is the time between fighting.”
The Christmas carolers are actually Intergalactic Carolers (Racheal Dosen, Angela Fox, Christopher Harney, Anya Klaassen, and Zach Sain) with whom costume designer Heajo Raiter clearly had the most fun out of the whole ensemble. Each caroler is from a different planet, involving a profusion of blue tentacles here, inspiration from David Bowie or The Rocky Horror Picture Show there - a universal grab bag of characters beautifully singing the heck out of familiar Christmas tunes with new lyrics that range from ridiculous (an alien version of the 12 Days of Christmas) to martial (“O Christmas Tree, winter has not defeated thee!”) to vaguely menacing (“Good fighting we bring, to you and your kin” or “Silent Night, before the fight”).
“It was like a surprise attack, but with music.”
Playwright Angela Fox, who in addition to being one of the alien carolers also did the music direction here, has a great collaborative partner in director Jami Newstrom. Newstrom provided some additional material to the script but also conceived the production design, which takes us from the Klingon home world to Painesville, Minnesota with a real theatrical flourish (and ample help from Andrew Vance’s lighting design). The production also makes use of large rolling tables and counter pieces which reconfigure to cleverly create multiple locations. The staging of things like ice skating, ice sculpture competitions, and snowball fights are also very inventive. How the (actual, for real) stage manager Kate Peters keeps this whole thing moving along without a hiccup is marvelous to behold.
“You have conquered my heart.”
Just Us Theater is a new theater company whose focus is on the work of women, trans, BIPOC, queer, disabled, and neurodivergent creatives. Their goal is to highlight the voices of marginalized artists and engage and enrich the broader community through high-quality productions. “I’ll Be Home for Kahless” is an offbeat but very fun way to introduce themselves. You have to love the different genres you’re mashing up in a parody like this in order to skewer them with such great humor, smarts and heart - and all the folks involved in this production really seem to love what they’re doing, and the chance to share it with the rest of us.
“You have blades on your boots. I like them very much.”
“I’ll Be Home For Kahless: The Hallmark Parody of the Season!” runs through this coming weekend, Thursday through Sunday, December 12 to 15, 2024 (with two shows on Saturday) at the Phoenix Theater (2605 Hennepin Avenue in Minneapolis). Visit the Phoenix website or the I’ll Be Home For Kahless website for links to tickets. And even the ephemeral nature of theater can’t defeat the Klingons, they’re already scheduled to be back again at the Phoenix next Christmas (November 28 to December 14, 2025), so mark your calendars for their return invasion of Painesville on stage.
4.5 Stars - Very Highly Recommended
(Illustration and logo courtesy of Just Us Theater)
