Two strangers. One Christmas tree. Three hours until Christmas. That’s the setup of “The Last Christmas Tree,” (EL ÚLTIMO ÁRBOL DE NAVIDAD) a play written and directed by Peruvian artist Diego Esquives that had its run in Lima before making its way to California’s Brisk International Festival, where it was staged at the Morgan-Wixson Theatre in Santa Monica with Esquives himself on the stage.
The premise is small on purpose. Sofía, a 26-year-old international student working as a waitress in Boston, walks into a tree lot desperate to grab something, anything, to get her through Christmas Eve alone. Her flight home got cancelled by a snowstorm. Gabriel, 30, owns a sports bar. He needs the tree for a party he’s throwing, and the old one caught fire. Only one tree is left. They grab it at the same time.
What follows is a two-hander that starts with a tug-of-war and ends somewhere much quieter. They argue. They try to flip a coin. Gabriel refuses to accept the outcome. Sofía tries to lie her way into the tree. They end up sitting down, trading stories, and figuring out that neither of them has anywhere to be tonight. Both are alone for Christmas, and both are bad at admitting it.
Esquives built the play around the kind of loneliness he’s felt himself. He studied directing and producing at AMDA College of the Performing Arts in Los Angeles, and he’s written about how the holidays hit differently when your people are a continent away. That’s what’s underneath all the bickering in the script. The fight over the tree is cover. Both of them are stalling because neither wants to go back to an empty apartment.
The aesthetic references are right on the surface. Esquives points to “How I Met Your Mother” and “Love Actually” as touchstones for the acting in certain moments, the costume style, and the staging. There are winks at “Home Alone” (Gabriel invents a ridiculous story about fighting off burglars and Sofía immediately clocks the rip) and a nod to “A Christmas Carol.” The comedy is character-driven and the beats land because the setup is so stripped down. A single Christmas tree. Two boxes of gifts. Two actors and a speaker playing villancicos.
Those actors are Alexia Dalmau, who plays Sofía and won the Oficio Crítico award for Best Actress, and Cristian Malca, who plays Gabriel and comes out of the same Bruno Odar school in Lima where Diego Esquives trained. Their chemistry is the engine of the piece. The script runs on banter, then drops into something raw without announcing the shift.
The selection for the Brisk International Festival put the play in front of a Los Angeles audience, which is a specific kind of milestone for any Peruvian theater artist. Getting an original Peruvian two-hander produced in Santa Monica is not a small accomplishment. Esquives handled the writing, directing, and producing, and then stepped on stage himself. For someone who works across acting, writing, directing, and producing, the project hits every discipline at once.
By the final beat of the play, Sofía and Gabriel have stopped fighting and started sharing. Gabriel tries to hand her the tree outright. She insists on splitting it instead. They take it to her car with a couple of folding chairs, grab hot chocolate from the cafe across the street, and wait for midnight together. A small argument over “Joy to the World” versus “The First Noel” is the closest thing to conflict they have left. A play that opens with two people wrestling for a tree closes with them carrying it out side by side. That’s the whole trick. Diego Esquives wrote a comedy that sneaks up on you, and he carried it from Lima all the way to a Santa Monica stage.
