'Tis the season for theater, books, and carnivorous plants: a Madison holiday survival guide
Sarah Buhl
A Venus flytrap at Olbrich Gardens awaits your leftover yams.
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As the holiday season looms like a giant fruitcake, fear not, future weary traveler. Even as the local concert lineup begins to slow to a pitiful crawl, there are ways, means, and places to quell the impending holiday malaise. If you’re looking to avoid family gatherings and the food fights that go with them, you’re going to have to have a plan. Luckily for you, The A.V. Club also gets plenty Grinch-like when the calendar flips to November and December, so we’re on the case with some soothing, artsy solutions to help you survive the holidays in Madison.
The sounds of silence
One of the most aggravating aspects of the holidays is being subjected to family gatherings where annoying people won’t stop talking. So if you’re looking for respite from the endless blabber, Olbrich Botanical Gardens (3330 Atwood Ave., 608-246-4550) offers sweet, sweet solitude. Not only does Olbrich offer warmth and shelter in a place where colors other than gray and white exist, it also has a few cool events on its upcoming agenda. From Dec. 5 to 31, the Flower And Model Train Show will provide some refreshing (and fresh) scents to go along with trance-inducing model trains. On more of a Little Shop Of Horrors note, there’s the Beasts In the Conservatory: Carnivorous Plants exhibit (through Jan. 3), which is the perfect way to do some research for those on your shopping list for whom a lily would be way too precious.
Short of a library, what better place to hide than a museum? The Chazen Museum of Art’s (800 University Ave., 608-263-2246) Back in the World: Portraits Of Wisconsin Vietnam Veterans exhibit may not do much for anyone’s melancholy, but it promises to provide an incisive look at how the war is etched into the faces of our state’s vets, even today. In a slightly cheerier turn, the Madison Museum of Contemporary Art’s (227 State St., 608-257-0158) Holiday Art Fair on Nov. 20 and the Holiday Craftacular Nov. 28 at the Madison Masonic Center (301 Wisconsin Ave., 608-256-5734) will take some of the sting out of the shopping experience with a shortcut around purchasing mass-produced crap. Also, it just might help a few starving artists keep their heat on through the winter.
Turn off your cell phones, please
It’s never fun to get that “Why didn’t you answer the phone?” message from mom, so having a surefire excuse is one method to mitigate the guilt. And we all know you absolutely cannot have your cell phone on in a theater, right? The new Forward Theater Company will be premièring the Midwestern production of comedic master Christopher Durang’s Why Torture Is Wrong, And The People Who Love Them (Dec. 30-Jan. 17), a play that unearths a pile of post-9/11 paranoia after a woman begins to suspect her own husband of being a terrorist. Broom Street Theater will have a dose of its usual tongue-in-cheekiness with McBeth (Nov. 13-Dec. 20), a contemporary retelling of Shakespeare’s Macbeth that includes a female antihero duking it out with ghosts in the boardroom. The Laboratory Theatre will be producing The Santaland Diaries (Nov. 27-Dec. 19), the stage production of David Sedaris’ iconic screwball Christmas essay.
Getting a tad darker, Mercury Players Theatre will put on Rob Matsushita’s 1SW33T R1DE (Nov. 20-Dec. 12), a harrowing account of the decisions a woman must make in the hours following a sexual assault. If comic relief is all that can cure what ails you, Overture Center has two farces on deck: Alfred Hitchcock’s The 39 Steps (Nov. 10-15) and The Complete Works Of William Shakespeare (Abridged) (Dec. 3-20). For a more frantic activity, check in on the always fun Wis-Kino Fall Kabaret at Sundance Cinemas Madison (Nov. 20-22). Here, local filmmakers have 48 hours to write and produce a short film with an arbitrarily imposed theme, and the results are always interesting, if a little surreal.
Hit the bottle
When all else fails, there’s always the trusty holiday fail-safe: drinking. On Nov. 28, you can find refuge in the bottle while heading for the hills for Wollersheim Winery’s (7876 State Rd 188, Prairie du Sac; 800-847-9463) A Vintage Christmas celebration. This shindig has free wine tastings, finger foods, carolers, and a Christmas-tree expert who’ll be giving all kinds of handy tips on what do with your tree after you forget to water it and it dies.
Legendary drunk and master of literary minimalism Raymond Carver is the topic of Carol Sklenicka’s new biography Raymond Carver: A Writer’s Life. Sklenicka’s reading on Dec. 2 at the West Side Borders (3750 University Ave., 608-232-2600) would be the perfect time to find a bottle of Teacher’s Scotch whisky and take a few pre-reading snorts, with bonus points for having someone's belly to pour it over. And if that last reference puzzles you, treat Carver's short-story collection What We Talk About When We Talk About Love like your emergency escape kit once you slouch back to the family.
