1222 Oceanfront: A Black Family Christmas (NWB Imaging, New Village Arts Center, KPBS, aired December 17, 2024)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

After Joy with the Tabernacle Choir KPBS showed a locally produced program, a live video of a play called 1222 Oceanfront: A Black Family Christmas. My husband Charles got home from work early (which meant I had to do some quick stepping to make dinner for both of us!) and caught the end of the Tabernacle Choir program and all of 1222 Oceanfront. From the online description on the KPBS Web site I’d expected this to be a concert of Black-themed Christmas music with actors doing scenes in between the songs. Instead it was a tightly scripted romantic drama by the late Dea Hurston, a local African-American author who died in July 2024 at age 73 after a 15-year battle with cancer and an accident which left her immobile for a time. “I could not comprehend information and I could not retain information,” Hurston told KPBS in 2022. “But I realized that I could still write. And so when I tried to get my life back, I took a class at Playwright’s Project and something happened in that class and it clicked with me ... I knew at that point I was a playwright.” Hurston also said she did not want to write “trauma plays” about the evils of racism and what it did to Black people; instead, she said, “I want to write about Black people doing normal things and having normal struggles and normal joys.” In 1222 Oceanfront, premiered in 2021 at the Dea Hurston Family Arts Center in Carlsbad and revived in 2023, she did precisely that. It’s about the family Christmas celebration Dorothy Black has been hosting at her home at 1222 Oceanfront Avenue in Carlsbad for 30 years, ever since she and her late husband James bought the house and then suffered through last-minute changes in the terms of the loan when the sellers realized that the buyers were Black. Among them were a sudden increase in the down payment and a demand that the Blacks buy insurance on each other – which came in handy when Dorothy’s husband James died 10 years later and the insurance settlement allowed Dorothy to pay off the mortgage and own the property free and clear, though we don’t learn that until quite late in the play.

The family Christmas celebration involves Dorothy’s two children, James, Jr. and Javier. James, Jr. is her and James, Sr.’s natural son; Javier is someone they adopted and the actor playing him looks Asian even though the character has a Latino name. (I assumed he was supposed to be Filipino; that’s the logical guess when someone looks Asian but has a Hispanic name.) Javier is also Gay – though no one in his adoptive family seems to have a problem with that, thank goodness – and he’s in a relationship with a man named Brian, who has been making excuses not to go to the Black family dinners for as long as he and Javier have been a couple. At least the Black children and their mates are all middle-class professionals – James, Jr. is an attorney with a big law firm in L.A.; his wife (whose name I can’t remember; it’s something like “Aja”) is a schoolteacher; Javier is a TV weatherman and his partner Brian is a podiatrist. Also in the dramatis personae is Dorothy’s sister, a feisty woman with a drive for love (and sex) belying her years – if The Golden Girls had had a Black cast member, she would have been it – and a man named Victor who owns an avocado ranch in Fallbrook (anachronistic in that most of Fallbrook’s avocado groves have long since been torn out and replaced by high-end housing developments) and works at the local post office, where Dorothy’s sister has met him and decided he’d be a perfect replacement mate for Dorothy even though Dorothy hasn’t had sex, or even dated, since the death of her husband 20 years before. The Blacks and their extended family have a long tradition of serving lasagna on Christmas Eve (it started, supposedly, when the Black family had only Italian food in the house one year) and James, Jr.’s wife brings along a side dish of collard-filled cannolis. James, Jr. stumbles on a letter from a real-estate appraiser, which leads him to conclude that his mom is planning to sell the house he grew up in and cash in on the huge appreciation values so she can live with Victor on his avocado grove in Fallbrook. Javier leaves a series of increasingly desperate phone messages for Brian, who eventually does turn up – though his foot is in a cast, courtesy of an accident (which he doesn’t explain to us) – and though he and Javier were originally planning to move to New York so Brian could do a residency, the accident and resulting surgeries will delay that for at least a year. It also turns out that the only reason Dorothy had the house appraised was she was seeking a loan to build a granny flat (today it would be called an “alternative dwelling unit,” or “ADU” for short) on the property.

It also turns out that James, Jr.’s wife is pregnant, which she found out by filching a pregnancy test kit from Dorothy’s sister’s handbag, so though James, Jr. and his wife were talking about having children in the future, that particular future has arrived significantly sooner than they intended. And the last big secret that emerges from the Christmas Eve dinner is that Dorothy already married Victor – they had a trip together to Las Vegas and went through one of the city’s notorious quickie chapels while there for a convention of lemon growers – and it ends happily, with Dorothy turning over the house to James, Jr. and his wife as he had long hoped. Along the way the characters sing enough songs that 1222 Oceanfront qualifies as a musical, and while some of the songs are familiar Christmas and spiritual standards – “What Child Is This?,” “Go Tell It On the Mountain,” “Silent Night” and a closing medley of “Up on the Housetop,” “Joy to the World,” “The Twelve Days of Christmas,” a Spanish-language version of “Jingle Bells,” “Angels We Have Heard On High” and “I Saw Three Ships” – others are originals. I had to guess at their titles because none of them were listed on Google’s music search app (just as there isn’t an imdb.com page for 1222 Oceanfront, nor any other online source for the show, which means I have no idea who any of the actors were; oddly, the cutest male in the cast was the actor playing Javier’s partner Brian, a tall, rather nellie man who was flashing a big basket under his grey sweat pants), but it sounded like they were called “Wake Up, It’s Christmas Morn,” “Beautiful Christmas Day,” “Back It Up” (a dance number), “Merry Christmas to Me” (sung quite beautifully by the actor playing Javier when it seems like Brian isn’t going to make it) and a country-style number called “All I Wanted for Christmas Was You” (which doesn’t sound at all like the similarly titled “All I Want for Christmas Is You” by Mariah Carey). When Brian finally arrives and explains that he couldn’t get any of Javier’s phone messages because his own phone died and he’d never memorized Javier’s number, I rattled off Charles’s phone number just to prove to my husband that I know it – and he said, “Yes, we grow up when people still had to remember phone numbers.” 1222 Oceanfront has some slow moments, but overall it’s a charming piece that proves Dea Hurston’s point that Black people have pretty much the same family issues as anyone else and certainly don’t live every moment of their lives getting screwed over by white racism, however much it might at certain times be a burden for them!