Signature’s ‘Walter Cronkite Is Dead’ an authentically funny holiday farce

The vagaries of air travel have provided grist for many a holiday farce, but Joe Calarco — writing for two of the region’s most celebrated actors, Nancy Robinette and Sharri L. Edelen — is chasing more than just laughs in Signature Theatre’s production of his new “Walter Cronkite Is Dead.” A tale of two women of a certain age who felt stranded long before a weather front marooned them in the departure lounge of Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport, “Cronkite” wastes no time establishing them as iconic citizens of Red and Blue America. Then it parks them at tiny table together and spends the next 90 minutes reminding us of that which we all profess to know — that stereotypes tend to evaporate whenever two people talk openly. Robinette’s matronly, buttoned-down city dweller and Edelen’s motormouthed, fannypack-wearing Walmart shopper have both experienced loss, the great equalizer that ensures that no matter how different we are, we “Aren’t So Very Different, After All.”

If there’s little mystery as to where we’re going — particularly in the final third, following a blackout that could just as well have been the curtain — Calarco, Robinette and Edelen make the journey feel authentic and lived. The title mourns the loss of the civility and dignity that the beloved newsman embodied in prior, divisive decades, but neither Calarco nor his creations — given vivid, dimensional life by these two actors — succumb to false nostalgia. Calarco simply wants for us to hear one another amid the din, and he acknowledges the abiding difficulty of that modest request by allowing Edelen’s shrill cell phone monologues and Robinette’s aggrieved silences to go on until the audience begins to feel trapped, too. (James Kronzer’s set evokes the canary archways of National’s main terminal readily enough to give nervous fliers hives.)