he holiday interregnum between Thanksgiving and Christmas is upon us, and just as the stores have thrown open their doors early to hoover money out of customers' pockets, the theatres are trotting out their Christmas Carols in droves. As the Boston Phoenix puts it, "the annual attack of the killer Scrooges is upon us, as various theatres milk the holiday cash cow."  Trinity Repertory Company in Providence (RI), North Shore Music Theatre in Beverly (MA), Worcester (MA) Foothills, Hartford Stage (CT), and Portland Stage (ME) plus innumerable community theatres are taking the midnight ride into solvency.

(My wife, who is Argentinian and lived through the military dictatorship in that country as a Catholic nun, saw Carol for the first time last year, Dickens's story not being a staple of Latin American culture.  She was puzzled why people felt so good about the story because by the end nothing essential has changed: Scrooge still owns the means of production and controls Bob Cratchit's life, and Scrooge's "redemption" most likely will go away in a few days because it is based on fear, not enlightenment.  Why, she wondered, would people celebrate values of exploitation and illusion during a season supposedly dedicated to the birth of the Prince of Peace -- and then, when we ran into the consumer traffic disgorging from the local mall with cars packed to the gills with "stuff," she understood perfectly.)

Some theatres are going a slightly different route with Carol. At the Tremont Temple, Gerald Charles Dickens, the great-great grandson of Charles Dickens, portrays 26 characters from the classic in the same location where the original Dickens performed it for an audience that included Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, James Russell Lowell, and Oliver Wendell Holmes -- I guess one had to have three names to get into the hall. And as a tie-in, for a mere $49.50 one can eat at the Omni Parker House (a sponsor of the event) a re-creation of the dinner that Dickens had in 1867: oysters with caviar, consommé Rothschild, Spanish mackerel maître d'hôtel, roast filet of beef forestière, braised root vegetables glacés, duchesse potatoes, and Charlotte russe à l'anasas.

Lyric Stage Company is presenting Inspecting Carol, a fusion of The Inspector General A Christmas Carol created some years ago by Daniel Sullivan and members of the Seattle Repertory Theatre.  Riffing a bit off Waiting for Guffman, an aspiring actor is mistaken for a representative from the National Endowment for the Arts and is given a buttered-up treatment by the near-bankrupt theatre.  Merrimack Repertory Company is staging Founder of the Feast, former artistic director David Kent's adaptation of Carol as "secular scripture" (whatever that is), and Turtle Lane Playhouse is ramping up Scrooge, The Musical.

Some theatres have done a full rinse to get the saccharine out of the mouth. Ryan Landry and the Gold Dust Twins, a company given to bad taste through gender-bending, offer How Mrs. Grinchley Swiped Christmas, the third of a trilogy of plays that have gored Dr. Seuss to the quick by presenting a work that answers the timeless question, "Can a pair of men dressed as cartoon hookers and one fag-hag evoke the spirit of Christmas?" Firefly Productions, a new company formed by Daniel Kells and Steve Maler, are presenting David Sedaris' SantaLand Diaries, a funny and acerbic account of Sedaris' stint as the elf Crumpet in Macy's SantaLand (originally done on NPR radio). 

And some theatres have ignored the season altogether.  New Repertory Theatre puts on Stonewall Jackson's House, Jonathan Reynold's silly satire about liberal attitudes, TheatreZone does Poona The Fuckdog by Jeff Goode (whose Eight Reindeer Monologues has its own acid to throw on the season), American Repertory Company barges in with Antigone, Yale Rep premieres Canadian playwright George F. Walker's Heaven (described as a cynical human-rights lawyer's campaign against "racism, religion, and the politically correct"), and Stage Door Theatre Company presents The High Priest of Infinity, David Butler's play about how "to restore the foundations of faith."

The "theatre district" in Boston consists of six theatres: the Wang, Schubert, Colonial, Wilbur, the Charles Playhouse, and the newly revamped Stuart Street Playhouse. At the Charles, Blue Man Group and Shear Madness appear to have achieved an unstoppable immortality, and there is talk that I Love You, You're Perfect, Now Change at the Stuart Street Playhouse may soon reach the same cryogenic state.  The Wilbur will be hosting a two-month stint of Fully Committed, thanks to Nicholas Martin, the Huntington Theatre's new artistic director who directed the show's Off-Broadway incarnation. (Fully Committed explores the travails of a man who acts as the reservation clerk for a tony restaurant and who must endure the bad manners of the riche, nouveau and otherwise.)  The Schubert jobs in the only East Coast stop of the mini-tour of Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman with Brian Dennehy and Elizabeth Franz; attention must be paid, as well as a ticket price of $75.  Nothing at the Colonial at the moment (perhaps the less-than-striking Seussical the Musical try-out there jinxed the place), but the Wang is ripping through a thousand-and-one-performances of The Nutcracker (with a follow-up in January with the not-Arthur-Kopit version of Phantom).

The best piece of the month? The House Not Touched By Death, created and performed by Pilgrim Theatre.  Based on the eastern parable about searching for a mustard seed in a house not touched by death (in order to teach about suffering and how to go beyond it), the piece is a staged radio play, complete with foley effects, song, choreographed movement, and a wry take on managed health care (our society's dismal attempt to create houses not touched by death, especially the death of shareholder stock value).

The second best? Marx in Soho, historian Howard Zinn's riff on a returned Karl Marx in the Soho of New York.

© 2000 Michael Bettencourt ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

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