A Christmas Carol: An Evening of Dickensian Delights Rachel Martindale’s 80-minute adaptation of Dickens’s revered novella is stripped to its essentials, as is Fury Theatre’s bare-bones staging, which Martindale directs and stars in. Jettisoning high production values (the set is two changing screens and a plain bench; the lighting effects are “on” and “off”), Martindale focuses almost entirely on Dickens’s florid language and hypnotic imagery. She and her two costars tell the story with candor and simplicity, much as your extroverted friends might at their annual holiday party. Some of the stage conventions are decidedly wonky (actors are perpetually ducking behind the tiny screens to “change characters” when all they’re typically doing is donning a new hats or scarves), but hearing the story without the typical overworked theatrical trappings is refreshing. —Justin Hayford
Gross Indecency: The Three Trials of Oscar Wilde The defamation lawsuit Oscar Wilde brought against the Marquess of Queensbury in 1895 resulted later that year in Wilde’s own imprisonment, with hard labor, for “gross indecency,” a euphemism for homosexuality. Moisés Kaufman’s theatrical rendition of these proceedings, here staged by Promethean Theatre Ensemble, is essentially a dossier of excerpts from Wilde’s trial transcripts and subsequent documents. Wilde comes across as a martyred Christ figure, his incomparable aphorisms transformed into ringing platitudes of inclusivity. As righteous indignation swells in our throats, though, something embarrassing happens: Wilde insists, in quotation after quotation, that moral grandstanding has no place in art. And yet the play itself is as emphatically a piece of moral grandstanding as you’ll find. Ill conceived and drearily acted, it violates all the canons of Wilde’s art in the noble cause of educational theater. —Max Mailer
Steampunk Christmas Carol The thinking goes that at least one person, or one thing, is about to go through some sort of conversion whenever you stumble upon a Christmas-related performance. None of them is perhaps more famous than Ebenezer Scrooge, the old miser of Charles Dickens’s classic A Christmas Carol. To be sure, that still holds true in E.D.G.E. Theatre’s steampunk version, which sees Scrooge living among robots and new-age machines. If we’re being honest, though, nothing about this little wrinkle adds anything especially novel; Scrooge is a grump, the ghosts are the ghosts, and the outlook for Tiny Tim isn’t good. But I would see this show again for its performers, all of whom charm. —Matt de la Peña
