The Ultimate Bah, Humbug!

By WILLIAM A. HENRY III

TITLE: INSPECTING CAROL

AUTHOR: DANIEL SULLIVAN AND THE RESIDENT ACTING COMPANY

WHERE: SEATTLE REPERTORY THEATER

THE BOTTOM LINE: A sly send-up of a regional-theater Christmas tradition bids fair to become a tradition itself.

It takes a Scrooge to say so out loud, but America's regional theaters have become sickly dependent on A Christmas Carol. Dozens of troupes mount Dickens' sentimental fantasy year after year -- using at least 20 different adaptations, most by artistic directors yearning to be credited as authors -- with ever diminishing artistic vigor yet unflagging box-office success. The profusion of wigs, frock coats and fake British accents typically has little to do with the rest of these companies' productions or the core creative reasons they exist. The show serves only as a cash cow and, in extreme cases, a tool for extortion: at some theaters, the right to buy seats is granted only to season subscribers.

A Christmas Carol is emphatically not part of recent tradition at Seattle Repertory Theater. In fact, it has been a standing joke within the troupe that artistic director Daniel Sullivan always fills the holiday slot with some play involving suicide. So when he decided to do the ultimate "Bah, humbug!" and create a show mocking the Carols elsewhere, he wrote an offstage suicide into the script. That small self-indulgence is about the only inside joke in Inspecting Carol, a piece so accessible and hilariously funny that, to Sullivan's surprise, it is also being produced this holiday season by half a dozen other theaters from Alaska to Sag Harbor, New York. At Chicago's Steppenwolf, part of the appeal is poking fun at the rival Goodman Theater's version of A Christmas Carol. At BoarsHead in Lansing, Michigan, Inspecting Carol plays in repertory with the target of its satire. Says Sullivan: "I guess it's becoming a tradition itself. I'm so dumb I never thought of it as a Christmas show -- so we're committed to touring it in Washington and Ohio next May and June."

Sullivan, who wrote the script in collaboration with the actors, borrowed the theme from Gogol's masterpiece The Inspector General, about a corrupt town that goes all out trying to bribe a feckless clerk whom it collectively mistakes for a government investigator. The setting and some of the plot, however, came from an episode Sullivan heard about when serving on a National Endowment for the Arts theater panel: a beleaguered troupe, desperate to sustain its grant, offered to bribe an agency inspector who was also a playwright by pledging to produce his plays.

In Sullivan's version, the man mistaken for an inspector is actually a computer wonk turned would-be actor. Aggressively talentless, he is nonetheless welcomed into the panicky troupe and cast as the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come. The play's finale, a catastrophic Christmas Carol that is the funniest scene on any American stage this year, echoes the uproarious mangling of Romeo and Juliet in Nicholas Nickleby. Props and gimmicks fail. The set collapses. One actor forgets all his lines in terror. And Tiny Tim, played all through rehearsals by a plump pubescent brat who has held the role for years and now nearly outweighs Bob Cratchit, decamps a day before opening, leaving the middle-aged "inspector" to inherit the part.

The sharpest zingers are directed at the National Endowment (a funder of Sullivan's show) and at what Sullivan calls "the process of both censorship and self-censorship," as when the imaginary troupe's artistic director cites the works she dare not mount except in bowdlerized form. In the play within the play, the actual inspector arrives just in time to see the fiasco and adores it, despite getting knocked unconscious in the melee: she perceives a deep expression of the decline of Western civilization and a succession of welcome bows to political correctness.

It is all a triumph for Sullivan, 52, who is one of the most successful directors not only in regional theater but on the commercial stage as well. In New York City he is currently represented by Herb Gardner's Conversations with My Father on Broadway and Wendy Wasserstein's The Sisters Rosensweig, which will transfer from off-Broadway to Broadway in March. His director's royalties for those shows are shared with Seattle Rep, where all those shows originated (as did Gardner's I'm Not Rappaport and Wasserstein's The Heidi Chronicles, also staged by him).

Sullivan's next Seattle venture is an adaptation of The Brothers Karamazov just as insouciant as Inspecting Carol. "It won't retain much of the plot," he says, "because it will star a juggling troupe, the Flying Karamazov Brothers." After this, his 12th season, Sullivan will take a year's sabbatical to do some writing and, if the project comes off, direct a long- planned film of Rappaport. But he will stay involved with fund raising for a new 300-seat second stage in Seattle and will definitely return. Says he: "I've never not been part of a group. That's what I grew up believing theater was, and it's part of what I try to honor, indirectly, in Inspecting Carol."