Director Robert Matthew Perry says, “To expect a night of laughs as residents of Armadillo Acres of Stark, Florida’s premier mobile home communities hunker down for the redneck Christmas ahead.” So reports, The Herald News (THN) to MHProNews, about the Little Theatre of Fall River, MA, featuring “The Great American Trailer Park Christmas Musical.”
The musical is billed as a sequel to “The Great American Trailer Park Musical,” which hit the stage in New York in 2004.
The “R” rating is for language, raunchy as well as “Redneck.”
Jeff Belanger plays “breastaurant” owner and Elvis wannabe Jackie Boudreaux, boyfriend to the “trailer park” Scrooge Darlene.
Darlene Seward, played by Kelly Morrell, hates everyone. She refuses to decorate her side of the “park Christmas tree.” THN says, “one of the characters is accidently (sp) electrocuted touching Christmas lights, residents of Armadillo Acres consider it a sign that things may just be turning around for them.”
Belanger explained that, “There is a lot of swearing in the play (one song is called ‘F*** It, It’s Christmas’) but it’s laugh-out-loud funny. Basically, these people have no shame. The show was a lot of fun to be a part of and it will be a lot of fun to watch.”
“We have everything in this play. Elvis (or an Elvis wannabe) is in the building, UFOs, alien abductions, a lot of redneck humor,” said Perry, sho is also the play’s Musical Director. “The three main girls (waitresses Lin, Betty and Pickles) keep the gossip in town going, but when the Trailer Park Scrooge (Darlene) gets amnesia, things turn very funny.”
All of this sounds like grand fun, save for the detail that it stereotypes manufactured home living and their residents as shameless buffoons. Since when is the true meaning of Christmas to put down a minority group?
Is making fun of manufactured housing and land lease community living an acceptable form of discrimination? Are manufactured homes – aka ‘mobile homes’ or ‘trailers’ to the play’s director, the Rodney Dangerfield of housing?
Until the manufactured home industry learns to project a better image, will the vacuum be filled by these forms of “product placement” entertainment? Is this what the MHIndustry should expect?
In a trillion dollar annual U.S. housing industry, how many billions of dollars a year does and will this kind of image cost MH producers and other professionals?
“A home is a home,” says NextStep’s President and CEO, Stacey Epperson. “To call it anything else, is simply wrong.”
Or as Henry David Thoreau said, “Most men appear never to have considered what a house is, and are actually though needlessly poor all their lives because they think that they must have such a one as their neighbors have.” Read more, click here.##
(Photo Credit: Jack Foley, Herald News)
