Season’s Gratings : Fed Up With the Usual, ‘Gooey’ Holiday Fare? ‘A Dolt’s Only Christmas Pageant’ Offers an Alternative

Christmas pageants aren’t supposed to come with warning labels. Tradition demands that they proclaim, “Come one, come all, and don’t forget the kids!”

Not so with Revolving Door Productions’ “A Dolt’s Only Christmas Pageant,” which opens Wednesday for a three-night run at the Tribune Theatre. There it is, standing out like a guy with a hockey mask and chain saw, on the show’s press releases: “NOT SUITABLE FOR CHILDREN OR IMPRESSIONABLE ADULTS.”

“Everybody else seems to be doing their basic Christmas shows, you know, like SCR (South Coast Repertory’s ‘A Christmas Carol’) and others,” said Joel Beers, the 28-year-old writer of this program featuring holiday carols, poetry, dancing, Santa and an original Christmas-themed play. “We figured that instead of jumping on the bandwagon, we’d do something with a twist.

“The pageant, in general, is satirical, but there won’t be nudity or flagrant obscenity. With the disclaimer, we didn’t want a mom and dad to open up the paper and say, ‘Wow, let’s go down and see it.’ We’re taking one of the most sacred cows (Christmas) and skewering it.”

Beers said the carols will be sardonic little numbers, some new and others with familiar tunes but lump-in-the-stocking lyrics. Nobody’s sure about the dancing yet, but it should be slammin’. Santa is certain to be rife with ho-ho-hos, but he’ll also be packing a gun.

As for the poetry, it will be dark, humorous, biting, whatever. Here’s a taste, from Beers’ friend and fellow poet Tom Rush’s “Potterville,” a mocking take on that seasonal staple by Frank Capra, “It’s a Wonderful Life”:

Frank Capra lied, George Bailey jumped

George Bailey got swept away

Down the raging, freezing torrent of the Bedford River

The back of his skull bashed in by a hurtling ice floe.

The centerpiece of the show is Beers’ “An Anti-Chri$tma$ Carol,” a good-natured but admittedly sneering sendup of Dickens’ classic.

In Beers’ reinvention, Scrooge is replaced by Doris, someone “who’s totally into Christmas, can’t get enough of it.” The problem is, nobody shares her enthusiasm. Everywhere Doris goes in this time-shifting, dimension-crunching journey, she finds Scrooges and Grinches.

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Instead of Marley’s Ghost, Doris encounters a janitor from her elementary school. He starts her on the path toward Christmas Past, which Beers described “as a montage of movie cliches,” to Christmas Present (“a plantation owner/TV evangelist”) and Christmas Future, a junkie.

Beers swipes at sentimentality, among other things, but delivers a roundhouse when it comes to the holiday’s commercialism. One of his favorite scenes features shoppers “chanting like pigs, banging the ground with their credit cards . . . basically, they act like a bunch of pigs.”

The piece, which lasts about 40 minutes, isn’t intended to be insulting--only different and possibly cathartic, Beers said.

“It’s an alternative to the gooey stuff out there,” he said. “The spirit of the holidays permeates everything; it’s almost offensive. You feel that if you don’t walk around with a big smile on your face, you’re a freak.

“The theme of the show is to be true to yourself. If you hate (Christmas), then feel free to really hate it. If you love it, then get into that, too.”

Beers, who noted that he actually enjoys the season and has fond memories of it (“I couldn’t sleep for days when I was a kid”), isn’t worried about offending his audience.

For one thing, he believes people should have a sense of humor when it comes to just about everything. Second, most folks who arrive for Revolving Door Productions offerings, which has been staging mostly original, avant-garde plays at the Tribune Theatre for the past several months, know what to expect.

“We have regulars (and) the audience is usually hip to what we do; in fact, they expect us (to try) something different,” said Beers, whose drama, “Indio,” received mostly good reviews when Revolving Door premiered it in June.

“Being different, that’s our niche, especially in Orange County.”

Still, Beers knows that things can go too far, that certain people can become enraged by the humor. It happened to Beers last year during a holiday poetry reading at Chapman University.

“A friend and I were doing one of our songs and this guy, a drunk, got really angry,” Beers recalled. “He wanted to beat us up. It took a while to calm him down.”

* Revolving Door Productions presents Joel Beers’ “A Dolt’s Only Christmas Pageant,” including the original comedy “An Anti-Chri$tma$ Carol,” opens Wednesday and runs through Friday at 8 p.m. at the Tribune Theatre, 116 1/2 W. Wilshire Ave., Fullerton. $5. (714) 525-3403.