STAGE REVIEW : ‘CHRISTMAS MEMORY’ ROOTED IN PAST, BLOOMS IN PRESENT

Two good actors telling us a story--it’s quite enough for theater. Truman Capote’s “A Christmas Memory” is the current Sunday-afternoon show at the Itchey Foot Ristorante, and it leaves a lovely light.

Nothing happens in this story. It’s simply Capote’s memory of how, as a 7-year-old, he would help an aging female cousin put up fruitcakes for their real and fancied friends (including President Roosevelt) every November.

The alliance couldn’t last, and it didn’t. The boy got older and was packed off to military school. The old lady got younger, and died. The poignancy of the story is its pastness. Under Michael Peretzian’s direction, Michael Tulin and Mary Carver manage to be both “back there” and here, in the acting moment.

They read the story quietly, with only a few gestures (as when they fly their Christmas kites). Their eyes and their voices do most of the work, drawing us into the spell, as good storytellers do.

But it’s more than live radio. Tulin’s spiky hair suggests that the 7-year-old upstart never did get tamed by military school, and when Carver gets scolded by some other grown-up in the house, not only do her eyes get red--her nose does.

“A Christmas Memory” is over in 50 sweet-sad minutes, and you wouldn’t want it any longer or any shorter. Madeline Puzo did the adaptation for the Mark Taper Forum’s Literary Cabaret and David Johnson provides a spare vibraphone accompaniment.

Performances are Sunday at 1 and 5:30 p.m.; 1 p.m. Saturday, Dec. 20, and at 1 and 5:30 p.m. Dec. 21, 801 W. Temple St., (213) 972-7231.