The Play That Came to Dinner in Prague : Stage: An adaptation of ‘A Christmas Carol’ with an international cast raises spirits in Czechoslovakia.

“A Christmas Carol” may be a classic, but an Americanized stage version performed for the first time in Czechoslovakia, and in English by an international cast?

What’s more, the dinner theater event was produced by a fledgling theater group, yet cost about 2 1/2 weeks’ wages for the average Czech.

Despite these obstacles, Los Angeles director David Schweizer presented Charles Dickens’ tale on stage for a week earlier this holiday season at the plush Hotel Atrium Praha--and got decent opening-night comments.

Czechs attending the opening-night performance were pleased with what they saw.

“I understood quite a lot and I enjoyed it quite a lot,” said Erika Tomackova. “It’s something new I’ve never seen before . . . It’s got a good spirit.”

Prague resident Jana Vlcek, who doesn’t speak English, said through her husband Josef that she was already familiar with the plot of the play, but that the night’s performance was “so transparent that someone who didn’t speak English (and didn’t know the story) would be able to understand it anyway.”

Americans in attendance liked it too. U.S. Ambassador to Czechoslovakia Shirley Temple Black pronounced the play “well produced, well performed and it’s nice to have dinner theater in Prague.”

The Atrium run was intended to help finance a second week of performances at the Theatre Semafor, aimed more at locals. Tickets there will cost just 40 crowns ($1.30), no dinner included, and run through Monday.

Schweizer happened into directing the play because it was an adaptation by fellow Angeleno Doris Baizley, a longtime friend. She put him in contact with Artists for Prague International, the group putting on “A Christmas Carol.”

The original director had backed out abruptly over a scheduling conflict, leaving the group within weeks of opening night and no one at the helm of their production.

“They were getting a clear idea of the scope of the thing and they really needed somebody,” said Schweizer, whose job as artistic associate at the Los Angeles Theatre Center evaporated when the LATC folded in October.

Ten days and several transatlantic faxes later, Schweizer was in Czechoslovakia preparing for preliminary rehearsals at the group’s current home, the historic Theatre Semafor just off Prague’s Wenceslas Square.

Artists for Prague International, the first of two nascent English-language theater groups here, produced its first play in July, the well-received but financially unsuccessful rendition of “The Fantasticks.”

The group was founded last spring by American actors Jesse Webb and Robert Mitchell and German director Annika Eysel-Sonka, who happened to love Europe and Prague and wanted to escape “big theater” in the United States, Mitchell said. They modeled it after the Brides, a nonprofit theater company in Los Angeles where Mitchell performed in the mid-’80s.

“Prague was an excellent place to come to because there were no limitations and (we thought) people would be open to new ideas,” Mitchell said. But, he added, the city has its downside. After 40 years of communist government, the country still suffers from a certain hesitancy to new ideas and undertakings, the result being that for start-up groups like theirs, “It takes twice as much work to get anything done here,” he said.

Most members of the cast and crew took on two or more positions. “It’s a scrappier situation,” Schweizer said. “They don’t have a lot of facilities, they don’t have a lot of resources. With tremendous energy and tremendous spirit, they’re sort of making it up as they go along.”

Though the play is performed in English, the cast and crew come from Australia, Britain, Canada, Czechoslovakia, Germany, New Zealand and the United States. Scrooge is played by Jiri Datel Novotny, a well-known Czech performer with a background in musical theater, cabaret and commedia dell’arte.

“It was a big school for me,” Novotny said of rehearsing and performing in the English-language production. “What I never expected was the leading role because of my language abilities.”

Like the two other Czech actors in the cast, Novotny is near-fluent in English. But speaking and understanding the language is one thing, Novotny said.Performing in it is something else.

The delivery of some of the play’s comedic lines was especially frustrating for both actor and director, Schweizer said. “This Czech actor is having to understand how to land Dickensian English, and the way (this adaptation) is written, it sort of flips back and forth between Dickensian and modern.”

“It seems appropriate that a Czech is in the title role,” said Jennifer Chamberlain, a Canadian living in Prague who played several roles. “I think it’s more colorful that someone’s portraying (Scrooge) who’s not so familiar with the fairy tale.”

Dinner theater “is pretty wacky for a person with my background,” said Schweizer, who staged such esoteric plays at LATC as Thomas Babe’s “Demon Wine” and Marlane Meyer’s “Kingfish.” “But there’s a sort of Martian level on which it appeals to me. In the post-modern era it can be looked at as the ultimate experimental trip.”