Albee home for Xmas The Gold Dust Orphans take Bethlehem BY CAROLYN CLAY
	Who’s Afraid of the Virgin Mary? By Ryan Landry. Directed by James P. Byrne. Set by Prof. Windsor Newton. Costumes by LT Lisa Simpson. Technical wizardry by Dr. Jen Bird. With Larry Coen, Ryan Landry, Chris Loftus, and Scott Martino. Presented by Gold Dust Orphans at Machine through December 23.

Who’s afraid of Edward Albee? Obviously not Ryan Landry, who borrows gleefully from the famously bowdlerization-averse dramatist for his booze- and revelation-soaked holiday orgy of sacrilege, Who’s Afraid of the Virgin Mary? It’s the shank of the evening in Bethlehem as the title character and her perpetually outshone husband, Joseph, return home from midnight Mass — just another ecclesiastical equivalent of an autograph signing for the BVM. "What a dump!" she declaims in echo of Albee’s braying Martha — and she might be describing the couple’s digs, still the Bethlehem stable where Mary gave birth these 2000 years ago and where braying rights are now shared with a donkey and the digs themselves with an assortment of barnyard friends including an ox, not a few chickens, and a feisty pig, all rendered at the Ramrod Center for the Arts like two-dimensional denizens of a picture book, their human companions looming larger — and louder — than life in the space off the bar at Machine.

Mary, it seems, has invited a younger couple over for a nightcap, and when Nick and Honey Kringle arrive — he still lanky at 33 in his fur-trimmed red suit and she showing a lot of leg in her skimpier variation on the Santa theme — the wine comes out and the gloves come off. Spiritual dukes it out with material as the North Pole wrestles the Holy Land for control of the holiday that made the hostess famous and Mary and Joseph head toward the evening’s final ugly "game," which will dismantle Christian theology at its root. It’s an audacious stunt pulled off by Landry’s Gold Dust Orphans with their usual drag-centric mix of humor, ribaldry, and low-rent theatrics. (Particularly memorable is the puppet accompaniment to Mary’s misty-eyed remembrance of the virgin birth, which is presided over by a Barbie angel.)

The borrowing from Albee is in fact such that the Orphans had better hope the wind wafting from their stable does not blow his way. ("How rustic," croons Honey upon arrival, "Is it a manger?" "Actually," replies Joseph, "it’s a crèche.") What’s surprising is how naturally Albee’s frame, with its marathon fisticuffs of flirtation and recrimination, suits Landry’s Biblical — and, of course, bibulous — decoration. Not even "I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Clause" envisioned Mommy as the mother of — as Mel Gibson would say — the Christ, but it works. And that reminds me: do not send Gibson tickets to this show. Landry might like to cast him as the hunky Nick, but chances are that, if drafted, he would not serve.

Those familiar with Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? will recognize dialogue lifted wholesale and realize, of course, down what dangerous theological roads the campy anti-canonical romp is going. But with the "jealous old bog" of a Joseph stomping around in his sandals, Mary slipping into "something more comfortable" that turns out to be her Catholic schoolgirl uniform, the gayer than merry Nick revealing a childhood that involved being discovered on an ice floe by penguins and reared by elves who awakened his sexuality in a hollow tree, and Honey nervously sucking up the Carlo Rossi as her husband-of-convenience reveals that she "likes to watch," the journey toward the play’s almost touching coda of peace and purgation is pretty hilarious.

Like all of Landry’s Orphans outings, this one revels in its winking, deliberate amateurism: the exaggerated sneers and insults, the cheesy scenic and sound effects, the sheer bigness of the performances amid the cartoon tableaux. But the bravura vaudeville is well paced by director James P. Byrne and vividly pulled off by the play’s cast of four (there is a brief intrusion by a do-gooder from A Christmas Carol soliciting a Scrooge-like Joseph for a donation), all veterans of last spring’s even funnier Pussy on the House. Landry, whose Mary "wears the robes in the family," is rouged and bewigged in braided silver as the BVM, slouching about her humble Middle Eastern surrounds like some eyelash-batting steamrolling vamp locked in mortal combat with Larry Coen’s seething Joseph. As the visiting "pagans" whose waiting sleigh is routinely pilfered for holiday booty, Chris Loftus plays gay Santa as straight man and Scott Martino brings a clownish poignancy to the hesitant Honey. If lightning doesn’t strike it, the season’s most outré holiday entertainment runs until two days shy of the imaginary son’s birthday.