Bag&Baggage Productions takes a trip to small-town Texas in a holiday showcase of ingenuity, sustainability, and uproarious laughter. Faced with an impending cash flow crisis, Bag&Baggage, like other theater groups nationwide, saw decreased attendance and funding in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. This season, the Hillsboro theater group pivoted its planned offerings to focus on sustaining the long-term future of the arts non-profit. “A Tuna Christmas” is the first of the new altered season. It’s a merry escapade, featuring rapid-fire costume changes, innovative stage and lighting design, and incredible performances. Directed by Mandy (rhymes with Gandhi) Khoshnevisan, who also serves as Bag&Baggage’s technical director, this comedy tasks just two actors with playing over 20 different oddball personalities, all with their own distinct costumes, voices, and relationships. It’s a wild satirical romp with a long history of both bridging divides and gleeful transgressiveness.
The play itself is the second installment of Ed Howard, Jaston Williams, and Joe Sears’ extended “Tuna-verse,” all focused around the residents of Tuna, Texas, the third-smallest town in the Lone Star State. As the city’s citizens prepare for both a cutthroat Christmas lawn decorating contest and a long awaited community theatrical performance (which is ironically facing its own funding crisis) two actors take us throughout town, examining the complex humor of life in smalltown Reagan’s America.
Since its first staging in 1989, “A Tuna Christmas” has been performed across the country, including a run on Broadway, which earned co-creator Joe Sears a Tony nomination for Best Actor. Its biggest stage, however, was the White House, where it had a command performance for President George H.W. Bush and his family. Now opening at the Vault Theater in Hillsboro, we sat down with Mandy Khoshnevisan to talk about this yuletide production and how this satire of the moral majority found its way in front of a U.S. President.
Mandy, thank you for joining me. What was the process of selecting “A Tuna Christmas” for this year’s holiday season?
We had to pivot our season because of a funding crunch, and so I actually did get to pick this one. I suggested this play after doing a little bit of a search, and then the Artistic Leadership Committee gave it the thumbs up.
Were you aware of it or the other plays in the “Tuna-verse” before you decided to do it?
You know, I wasn’t familiar, but I’ve heard of them before. I know they’re staged a lot, they’ve been around since 1981, and they’ve been done a lot by schools and stuff. I’ve talked to people who recognize the name already, so that was great. But when I read the script, I was just like, oh, it’s funny, it’s Christmassy, but it’s not too sentimental. It’s like the right amount of sentimental. I really liked the kind of the simple aesthetic and the sort of character-based nature of it.
With so many characters, the cast has to do a lot of costume changes. At the same time, however, almost all of the props are improvised on stage. Is this something from the original play, or is that something you came up with for this production?
There was actually a lot of action written into the script already, which is kind of unusual. But for a lot of the prop work, some of it I thought up, and some of it the actors thought up. When DiDi [the local gunshop owner], for example, is yelling at her husband from backstage, he has to stall on stage with no direction. So Trevor [the actor playing one half of the cast] spontaneously reached under the table and pulled out a beer can that was in hiding. So to me, that’s good to know that was just sort of in the moment, or at least originally. He was thinking, ‘they talk so much about how much this character drinks all the time, but in the play we never see it.’
The easy thing about having improvised props is that you don’t have to ask somebody to go get it, you know, it doesn’t add any burden on anybody. You could just be like, oh, now there’s a beer can under the table. No, for sure.
But the play did say specifically that the Christmas stuff, the Christmas trees and the Christmas ornaments, were supposed to be real. And I was like, that makes sense for a Christmas play, just so you can have something concrete on stage, along with the actors.
I really loved the trees! Each one was so tied to the characters that decorated it, and helped create a sense of space. What was it like putting those props together?
It was really fun. Our scenic designer, Karen Wingard, has been doing props for us for a couple of years, pretty consistently.
And so since the set for the show had to be kind of general and kind of abstract, we had her do the set and the props. She put together all the Christmas trees. She is great at that kind of detail. For example, the tree at the radio station has fake barbed wire, all cowboy-themed ornaments, a cowboy hat, and a bandana on top of the star. And Karen just loves that kind of detail. And Didi’s Christmas tree has real shotgun shells and a garland of, like, camo and ghillie cloth. And she painted the plastic grenades orange so they would stand out. It was delightful. Because there is so little else on the set it gives the characters a little bit of context. It is fun for each to have their own kind of different Christmas mood.
I’m a big fan of theater with lots of quick costume changes in it. What is the process of doing dozens of costume changes in a two hour show? What does that look like backstage?
It’s pretty wild. So Annika Elliott and Clem Dorsey, who are two of our backstage crew, have been doing lots of rehearsing, and we knew there were going to be costume changes throughout. The actors had been sometimes rehearsing with a placeholder. And so we didn’t actually get all of the costumes together and all of our staff to practice together until tech rehearsal, which was this past Sunday.
And so backstage ,there’s a huge IKEA bookcase with coat hook racks clipped to it. And there are cubby holes and hangers and coat trees. And I think they basically spend the whole time moving back there, planning, picking up the costume, and going to where the actor is going to come out.
They change the actor. They take the costume that the actor was wearing, and they either put it back or they put it in the discard bin if it’s not going to come back. And then they’ll go somewhere else and set up someone else’s.
And they also are puppeteering and sometimes moving the set. I think the original productions had three dressers instead of two, but I don’t know where we would put a third person.
Well, speaking of the set, I again was very impressed by the utility, the Swiss army knife-like style, of the set, the way that it could change to whatever you needed. What was the process of putting that set together?
I love that term, Swiss Army knife. Karen will be very excited. She did some research, and the kind of basic aesthetic is the “inside outsideness” of it. It’s kind of Texas facades and then a landscape with wood grain on the top. And so I, as the technical director, also had to build the set. So I would consult with Karen about what, and she came up with the concept of it.
We decided, because our space is so modular, we’re going to have to put it in this corner because there are so many costume changes that we’re going to have to be able to get to the backstage hallway. So that was a consideration from the start. And so she, I think, wanted it to be in the proscenium, but we made her be in the corner.
So she gave me the layout, and she wanted it to have these different bits that slide out and pop out and rotate. And so, since our theater is made from a bank and the floor is concrete, we cannot drill into the floor. And this is always an issue with every show that we do.
The set is held up so you can’t see any visible bracing, but they’re braced either to the back wall or to weighted blocks on the floor. So everything is kind of placed. It’s just about as realistically Western facade as you can get.
Trevor Harter and Samuel Scott Campbell, the two stars of this production, have to create distinct characters, voices, and mannerisms for almost two dozen people. What was that like for you and them to bring this all to life?
It was fun. I mean, it was probably very exhausting for them. Because usually, when you’re in a play with so many characters, you don’t have to be at every rehearsal the whole time. So before the first day, we did a read-through, which we always do, and we did design presentations, and we had sponsors and board members come, we read through the whole thing.
And then for the next couple days, we did character work, because before we did any blocking, I wanted them to kind of figure out who everybody was. So I did some movement stuff, because I know actors have different techniques for finding characters. Then we did some weird movement exercises where we walked around the room, experimented with some different ways to move. Trevor was like, I do Laban [an acting method based on movement]. Great. Sam was like, I like animals. Great, animal movement.
So, we walked around the room a lot. And then we kind of settled on pairs of characters, and they had the script for a while. So they’d been kind of thinking about it already.
So I’d ask, how do we think Thurston is physically and vocally? And how do we think Arliss is physically and vocally? And then I had them read a scene, and then I had them improvise for a while as those characters, which was really fun for me.
In terms of how they interact physically and how they look at each other and what the kind of power status dynamic is between them and stuff like that. So we worked on that for a couple days. And then we kind of blocked everything out.
We spent almost an entire rehearsal on just tracking every scene where we had a lot of business or we had to hand things back and forth. I’d be like, okay, wait, what kind of cup are you handing to your friend? Does it have a handle? Is it a coffee cup? Is it heavy?
In your director’s note in the program, you write about how this play was written as a send-up of Ronald Reagan and the moral majority, not as a celebration of the reductive ideas and stereotypes that often flourish in small towns like Tuna. “A Tuna Christmas,” however, was also performed at the George H.W. Bush White House. How does a play end up directly in front of the people it was intended to satirize?
It was really interesting. I read the script, and it does have parts that do make you step back for a moment. You know, we had other artists come in and watch an early run of the play. And I asked, is there anything in there that makes you feel uncomfortable? And they didn’t, so we did not edit anything. I did a lot of research on the playwrights, and for my kind of design presentation, and just sort of thinking about it. The two original actors and their original director were the ones who wrote all of these plays. They brought “A Tuna Christmas” to Broadway, and actor Joe Sears was nominated for a Best Actor Tony Award. This Broadway production was the one that did a command performance at the White House in the early 1990s.
And the actors who developed these characters both grew up in the South and in small towns like Tuna, and they speak very affectionately about where they grew up. When they wrote their first play, it was a lot more satirically biting than the Christmas one. By the time they wrote this one, they were more fond of these characters.
Even though both plays [the original “Greater Tuna” and “A Tuna Christmas”] were performed for the President, they’re basically skewering; they also speak very affectionately about those kinds of people they knew growing up, and people they loved.
As I was watching, I sometimes couldn’t get the image of Barbara Bush seeing it out of my mind, seeing the things in the show. That really is transgressive.
One of the original writers, Jaston Williams, is gay. And Vera Karp [Tuna’s resident snob and acting leader of the local Smut-Snatchers, originally played by Williams] was apparently like a huge gay icon in San Francisco in the 1980s. They had a long residency in the Bay Area at that time, around the time Dianne Feinstein [a longtime politician who angered the city’s sizable gay population when she refused to extend domestic protections to same-sex partners] was running for mayor. Well, Vera Karp also ran for mayor, and she got on the ballot, too! Feinstein’s slogan was ‘she’s not one of the boys.’ So Vera’s slogan was ‘she is one of the boys.’
What do you want audiences to get out of “A Tuna Christmas?”
I want to make people laugh, and I want to maybe make people cry.
In Hillsboro and across the whole Oregon area, there are a lot of people with a lot of different political opinions. It was Jaston Williams, when talking about performing for different political spectrums, he said, if I can make a bigot laugh, I know he’s got a sense of humor. And that’s something we have in common.
I think it’s for everybody. And it’s kind of interesting in these times, when there are people who might say words I wish they wouldn’t say, but are also kind to each other. I feel like Petey’s monologue near the end, where he says, Peace on Earth, goodwill towards men. Wouldn’t that be nice? That’s something to wish for.
You know, like, Christmas. Christmas is complicated, and people are complicated. But I think we can all agree that peace on earth and goodwill to everybody is a nice thing to wish for.
“A Tuna Christmas” continues through the 21st.
Portions of this interview were edited for clarity and brevity.
HOW TO TAKE IN THE SHOW AND MORE ABOUT B&B
Tickets are $25 for general admission or $40 for a “Pay It Forward” ticket, which helps extend opportunities for lower-cost tickets to those who may not usually be able to attend theatrical productions. Pay What You Can performances will be held Dec. 11 and Dec. 20. For any performance, we also have a $5 Arts for All option.
An ASL-interpreted performance will be offered on Dec. 13 with a d/Deaf community pre-show check-in, and an audio-described performance will be provided on Dec. 14. We offer touch tours upon request. Wraparound programming will include a talkback following the Dec. 7 performance, B&B classic caroling, and Pre-Check Lectures ahead of select showings. Additional dates of support programming will soon be announced.
Bag&Baggage also offers its PASSPORT program, which provides high school students free access to any performance throughout the run, and $5 tickets for college students with a valid student I.D. For more details, email boxoffice@bagnbaggage.org.
About Bag&Baggage Productions
Bag&Baggage is Hillsboro’s professional theatre company and a cornerstone of the city’s Cultural Arts District. For two decades, the company has produced bold, thought-provoking work that reflects the vitality and diversity of Washington County.
Upcoming at B&B
March 13-15, 2026: Third Angle Presents Dies Irae, Desirée
The Vault and 3A present a new multi-sensory chamber opera: Dies Irae, Desirée is a satirical exploration of fringe belief systems, cults and their mainstream appeal in the modern age.
April 26, 2026: Camp B&B
Welcome to Camp B&B! Join our staff and company artists for an afternoon of all your favorite classic campout activities—indoors. Tasty smores, scary stories by the fire, imaginary nature hikes, arts and crafts, and more await you at our Spring fundraiser! This event is all ages, free to attend, and all proceeds from games, activities, and snacks go to benefit Bag&Baggage Productions, a 501(c)(3) non profit theater company in Downtown Hillsboro.
May 5, 2026: Staged Reading: I is for Invisible by DeLanna Studi (NPAN & AGE)
Directed by Jeanette Harrison. Native Performing Arts Network presents this First Look Staged Reading as part of its Nationwide Theater Day of Action on the Day of Awareness for Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Relatives. Collaborative with B&B and Advance Gender Equity for the Arts (AGE). Join us and wear red!
June 4-21, 2026: Antíkoni by Beth Piatote (Native Theater Project)
Beth Piatote’s Antíkoni is a bold and urgent reimagining of Sophocles’ Antigone, framed through a Native American perspective and set within a museum filled with Indigenous belongings. In a near-future world where Nationalists have seized power, a Nez Perce family is caught between the demands of modern survival and the sacred traditions they are determined to uphold. At the heart of the conflict is Kreon, a Native museum curator who complies with the new regime to protect his position, and Antíkoni, who refuses to let go of her people’s truth—risking everything to honor what is sacred.
