Followers of Paula Vogel's playwriting already know bad things happen in cars.

In Azuka Theatre's coproduction with Drexel University's Mandell Professionals in Residence Project of Vogel's The Long Christmas Ride Home, as in her 1998 Pulitzer Prize-winning play How I Learned to Drive, the car is a no-man's-land where rules governing acceptable behavior are suspended. The script asserts itself clearly as Vogel's powerful personal flip side to Thornton Wilder's The Long Christmas Dinner.

Adding an extra degree of separation from the norm are three bunraku puppets designed by director Aaron Cromie. Each hand is operated by a separate black-clad puppeteer (all Drexel University students), and the puppets' expressions are somehow both blank and winsome.

Two daughters and a son huddle in the backseat on the way to their grandparents' house for Christmas dinner, as their human parents argue up front. Craig Vetter's set allows for no warmth, no padded leather on which a carsick puppet cheek can rest. It's as barren as the adults' marriage: gray benches, some sliding Japanese screens. Christopher Collucci's sound design is similarly chilly, with occasional bells chiming or muted music thumping.

During the play's first half, the children are their parents' puppets, too. Tightly wound Man (Seth Reichgott) and frumpy Woman (Amanda Grove) recite both their offspring's lines and their own. When the family's roadside implosion finally occurs, it sends a specific shard of parental disapproval and neglect to lodge in each child's psyche for the rest of his or her life.

Unfortunately, Vogel is slightly less effective or affecting when the kids grow up. No longer puppets, Keith Conallen's Stephen, Janice Rowland's Rebecca, and Allison Heishman's Claire spent their young adulthood seeking answers via monologue to the questions raised by that evening's events.

Stephen, like his namesake St. Stephen (much is made of this correlation), is martyred in pursuit of his father's love, while his siblings spend the evening of the Feast of St. Stephen - when mummers traditionally went house-to-house seeking food and drink - wandering in the snow, knocking at closed doors and searching for love.

The parents are an interfaith couple - he is Jewish, she is Catholic - and Vogel raises delicate issues of religious conflict in that Man is Jewish, and as the first Christian martyr, St. Stephen's relationship with the Jewish people was, ahem, rather complicated.

Nonetheless, Conallen, despite some speechy-sounding propheteering, carries the gentle spirit of Stephen's puppet self into manhood. Rowland and Heishman also bring with them the ferocity and vulnerability of Rebecca's and Claire's younger selves.

Cromie's direction is unsparing, and as expected from this longtime Philly puppeteer, this production's humanity is at its deepest when reflected by its puppets' subtle movements. A head tilt, a wooden elbow jabbed at a sibling accompanied by unblinking eyes, it's a tabula rasa upon which the audience might imprint its own weighted, youthful - and long purposefully suppressed - holiday memories.