Holiday Leftovers

Ghosts of Christmas plays past are haunting Dallas theaters this season. So many playhouses are doing the same shows they did at the same time last year that reviewing them again feels like "OK, campers, rise and shine, and don't forget your booties 'cause it's cooooold out there."

That's from Groundhog Day, a movie. But star Bill Murray also played the title role in Scrooged, the umptillionth movie remake of Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol.

Few actors in movies, TV or particularly regional theater escape A Christmas Carol, or some version of it, entirely. You start your career as Tiny Tim, mature into Bob Cratchit and wear the whiskers of Ebenezer Scrooge before you're finished, because every theater large and small in the Western Hemisphere eventually stages the thing. Nobody's written a more crowd-pleasing Yuletide fable since Charles Dickens put pen to parchment in 1843, so it keeps being reworked, updated, spoofed and wholly or partially plagiarized year after bloody year.

You certainly can't swing a crutch in this town between Thanksgiving and New Year's without hitting a member of the Cratchit family. And right about now, there are some stage-hogging Tiny Tims who need a sound thrashing, believe you me.

Take Erik Archilla, a grown-up actor pretending to be a rather stupid child in Risk Theater Initiative's not-so-jolly production of Christopher Durang's Mrs. Bob Cratchit's Wild Christmas Binge. Pulling more faces than a cosmetic surgeon, Archilla mugs shamelessly and endlessly as Tiny Tim. He played the part last year, along with other members of the Risk cast, in a production of this play at Richardson Theatre Center. Same play, same actors, but darned if Risk's Mrs. Bob isn't a right old mess. Rife with coarse acting, missed cues and bungled comedy bits, it's so sloppy and unfunny it starts to feel kind of sad.

Director Tom Parr IV staged this show in Richardson and at Risk. With a year between, he might have devised ways to tighten and brighten it, but he hasn't shown a sure hand with comedy before, and with this one his idea of hilarity is having actors fall down a lot. He also has a peculiar habit of placing bodies in tight clumps on the far sides of the stage, leaving the center a gaping chasm where nothing's going on. He makes Mrs. Cratchit, played with a pissed-off snarl by Allison Pistorius, stand sideways to the audience, forcing her to strain her neck to speak to actors standing behind her. Often characters stand half in the dark, unaware of hot spots in the lighting.

Not all of the failure of Mrs. Bob falls on director and actors. They're working with a script that's a ding-dong dud. Long, long ago, Christopher Durang brought forth funny stuff like his scathing satire of Catholic education titled Sister Mary Ignatius Explains It All for You, which was an award-winning Off-Broadway hit in 1980. But after that, he developed humor deficit disorder. Later works, including Baby and the Bathwater and The Marriage of Bette & Boo, fizzled. Mrs. Bob Cratchit came about in 2002, though its stale references to Mia Farrow, Leona Helmsley and Milli Vanilli hint that the script could have been sprouting mold at the back of Durang's desk drawer since 1987.

Like other writers who've tried to one-up or send up Dickens, Durang has gone for cheap shots at Christmas Carol's sentimentality. Among the creaky modernisms, including the appearance of Enron execs in Scrooge's office, he also throws a few dull darts at The Old Curiosity Shop, Oliver Twist, It's a Wonderful Life, Gift of the Magi, The Little Match Girl and A Charlie Brown Christmas. If Mrs. Cratchit is going to see what her life could have been like had she never been born (that's the Capra nod), we really shouldn't have to wait till well into the second act to hear about it. By then, we've lost interest in the whole shebang.

The "binge" Durang alludes to in his title isn't even all that wild. Bob Cratchit (Chad Gowen Spear) keeps bringing home starving foundlings he can't afford to feed. His wife tosses each tot into the cellar and declares she wants to skip Christmas, get drunk and throw herself off London Bridge. She hies herself to a nearby pub and tosses back a few with the neighborhood wenches. End of binge.

This bitter, PG-rated take on Dickens' work is an overlong collection of pointless nasties. Scrooge pepper-sprays a Cratchit kid. The Ghost of Christmas Past (played under a poofy black wig by slow-on-the-uptake Gloria Vivica Benavides) Tasers Scrooge in the neck. Durang has even resorted to an out-of-nowhere and completely archaic dig at the women's movement, with Mrs. Cratchit wishing "this was 1977 and I could be admired for my unpleasantness."