Review: PRISM PRODUCTIONS Presents the Most Bizarre Christmas Carol of All Time

There is a whole lot going on in Prism Productions' most recent dramatic effort: The Farndale Avenue Housing Estate Townswomen's Guild Society Production of A Christmas Carol. Without a doubt, Prism's presentation of David McGillivray and Walter Zerlin Jr.'s festive play of tomfoolery and shenanigans was one of the most bizarre productions I've ever seen. The cast, playing a group of women in an upper-crust ladies' social group with thespianistic aims (and local actors hired to help with their production) creates a Christmas Pageant-style performance loosely based on Dickens' Christmas classic--and it's a totally unexpected fall down a rabbit hole of meta-theatrical reality infused with a dash of slapstick and a whole lot of bring-your-own-booze.

The third in Prism's mini-series of plays this season, The Farndale Avenue Housing Estate Townswomen's Guild Society Production of A Christmas Carol is mouthful for what can be described as well-controlled chaos on stage. It was the drunken company Christmas Party of the Santa Barbara theatre community, and to be honest, I appreciate that I was invited.

The concept is simple: Society ladies from a bygone Stepford-era amuse themselves by putting on plays for, ostensibly, their friends (the audience). This concept works really well, it turns out, for a company like Prism--everybody has been in a CBB/Prism Production at some point, so there's always a large support base from the theatre community. This time around it was Tiffany Story, Shannon Saleh, Miller James, Britni Alleman-DeLorenzi, and Kathy Marden who chewed the Prism scenery. Farndale offers some fairly blatant inside jokes to the theatre community, including the use of an Indy award and, at one point, a portrait of Brian Harwell, as props. It's absurdity purely for the sake of absurdity, but as a reveler in the inherent weirdness of the holiday season's cultural oddities, I appreciated the Guffman-does-A-Christmas-Carol experience.

Allow me to expound on the highlights of this show. There were unexplained song-and-dance numbers in a variety of styles from interpretive dance to kick-line follies with Scrooge in swath of sparkly showgirl sequins. I consider the backstory of these choices, and I see the Farndale ladies, after a few too many bottles of luncheon wine, going around the table and, one by on, adding scenes they'd like to perform to the play. There's also plenty of audience interaction: the Farnum Ladies lead the audience in several festive songs that no one knows, and games of poorly-executed charades, to which the audience halfway commits. I imagine it's a fairly accurate re-creation of the audience in the Farndale universe, and it's somewhat unnerving to be placed the role of audience member when you are, in fact, a member of the audience.

Tiffany Story as the actress-diva playing Scrooge lightened my life in a way I never thought a woman in a bald-cap over long tendrils of grey wig hair could. Her frustration with the incompetent Farndale ladies and their even more incompetent tech crew was barely contained in a gleeful spiral into narcissistic fury. Shannon Saleh, who's in the equivalent of traction for some vaguely discussed, appropriately ridiculous reason, provides physical comedy gold as the consummately polite lady who's just doing her best, but clearly in a lot of pain (and, as you might guess, the butt of many physical jokes).

There are many elements of A Christmas Carol in the production, but more elements that aren't even close, and the Farndale production is more of an expression of the guilty pleasure of actors making fun of bad actors, and the rest of us going along with the joke. Most of it doesn't make any sense at all, but it's a reminder to take time to experience playfulness, even in its most strange and farcical forms.

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