I know, I know: People say it all the time, but the holidays really do come earlier every year. This season, two veteran playwrights see their respective Christmas wishes make Boston premiers. Last Friday night the Huntington Theater Company opened Paula Vogel's A Civil War Christmas while the SpeakEasy Stage Company opened Craig Lucas's Reckless, directed by Brandeis' Director of the Arts Scott Edmiston. If one were to compare A Civil War Christmas to Dickens' classic A Christmas Carol, then surely Reckless would be analogous to 1983's unforgettable film A Christmas Story. Reckless is hysterical, heartbreaking and impossible to sit through without reliving some aspect of your own holiday agita.Reckless opens on Christmas Eve when Rachel (Marianna Bassham M.F.A. '02) is forced to flee via her bedroom window from a hit man hired by her husband Tom (Barlow Adamson). Leaving her family behind with only the pajamas on her back, Rachel encounters Lloyd, his deaf-mute wife, Pooty, and everything else ranging from a surreal game show to more therapists than you can shake your copy of Dianetics at. With Lloyd and Pooty (played, respectively, by another Brandeis alum, Larry Coen '81, and Kerry A. Dowling) Rachel manages to find something of a family, but soon tragedy comes knocking. Reckless is a story of zany mayhem and skeletons in the closet that is breathlessly hysterical and often deeply touching. The production also features Will McGarrahan, Sandra Heffley, Karl Baker Olson, and a staple of the Boston stage, Paula Plum, as the therapists (too many of them to count). The ensemble members are sharp and well tuned with each other, with a particularly perfect performance by Coen. Together they navigate the SpeakEasy's shallow stage with ease, clearly having as much fun with each other as the play allows (which is a lot).

The holidays have the uncanny ability to inspire both dread and delight, and Reckless is hardly an exception, posing a steep challenged for the design team. I sat down with director Scott Edmiston to talk about some of the challenges of the play, including its ambiguous ending.

"I don't want to tell people what to think, only pose meaningful questions," he said. Edmiston went on to describe how he and the design team envisioned a world for the play much like Alice's Wonderland. The similarity between Rachel and Alice is easy to find, and although Christina Todesco's set looks less like Carroll's Wonderland and more like a bizarre department-store display, it evokes both a dreamlike wintry forest and a nightmarish cave. The scrim-wall and the sheer width of the stage tended to give the production a flat look, but nevertheless it all works well here. Prof. Charles Schoonmaker (THA), another Brandeis affiliate, designed the production's flawless and evocative costumes.

Playwright Craig Lucas wrote the book for The Light in the Piazza, which Edmiston directed for SpeakEasy last year. That story, like Reckless, has what Edmiston identifies in Lucas's writing as a "fable quality," explaining, "They ask if things happen for a reason or if things just happen." It's an important, if unresolved question in Reckless. At times the production seemed to not quite know what to do with itself during its darkest scenes. Yet if some of the play's more dramatic moments didn't quite feel, well, dramatic enough, then consider that in Reckless, as in life, people are not always what they seem and that sometimes, without rhyme or reason, things happen. It's just as the Duchess tells Alice, "Everything's got a moral, if only you can find it."

Reckless runs through Dec. 12 at SpeakEasy Stage Company in Boston. Tickets are $30 to $50.