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Somehow, in 40 years, 12 of them spent as an arts critic, I have managed not to see the Guthrie's production of A Christmas Carol, which is an extraordinary and embarrassing feat. It's sort of like being a New Yorker and never seeing the Yankees play, or being from Los Angeles and never using cocaine. But A Christmas Carol is a tricky subject for an arts critic to write about, for a few reasons. First and foremost, because one of the central themes of the play is that we'd all be better off if, for at least a short while, people set aside their meanness and cynicism and bitter black humor and tried to be nice. This is the sort of message critics respond to in the way that hunters repond when they are told they are going to have to get rid of their guns.

It's also hard to write about A Christmas Carol because it's not theater -- at least, not how we mean it when we talk about theater. Sure, it shares a lot in common with theater, such as a cast and stage properties and ticket sales. But theaters don't do Christmas shows for the art of it, but rather for quotidian, and necessary, economic reasons; after a few drinks, theater managers will, with some embarrassment, tell you the percentage of their yearly gross that comes from their Christmas shows, and it's a lot. I'm not going to begrudge a fellow an honestly made buck, especially in these nervous economic times, but reviewing Christmas plays is a little like reviewing Santa Bears or roasted chestnuts or anything else that's manufactured to capitalize on this season. The critic is a little beside the point here.

And A Christmas Carol doesn't function as a play might -- at least, as modern plays work. A Christmas Carol is, instead, a little like Greek theater, in that almost everybody in the audience already knows everything that is going to happen in the play, and has known for most of their lives. Scooge's Christmas Eve encounter with three seasonal ghosts and one dead business partner is as well known to most Americans as the myth of Iphigenia was known to the Ancient Greeks. Like them, when the story is dramatized, we don't go to see it for any real surprises, except perhaps for the small surprises of seeing how it is staged and how the playwright might have interpreted it. But mostly we go because it is one of our myths, because it is a pageant, and because it is tradition. And it is about as useful for a critic to write about this sort of thing as it would be for him to show up at a Christmas party and start disparaging the mulled cider.

So A Christmas Carol is a tough sort of thing to write about, but I'm a tough critic, and so I'll take the challenge. And I find I do have a few things to say, firstly about Dickens' book, if you will bear with me, and then specifically about the Guthrie's version of the show (if you just want to read my take on the Guthrie production, skip the next few paragraphs). I've always been sort of fascinated by A Christmas Carol, in part because it is such an efficient machine of sentiment, and I am hard-pressed to say why. It is a story without much by way of conflict, which is generally an important thing in a story, but instead the moment the Ghost of Christmas Past drags Ebenezer Scrooge back to his childhood, the miser's heart breaks and he becomes a changed man. But instead of saying, wow, that was a quick one and knocking off early, the ghosts continue to torment him. Scrooge takes this rather gamely, declaring he knows there is some sort of lesson they have to impart and he shall try to be a very good student. It's as though Scrooge had been wanting to drop the whole miser act for years and was just waiting for someone to ask him. But generally audiences don't respond as well to sudden transformations as they do to a character kicking and screaming his way toward goodness; the latter is just better drama.

There are good characters in A Christmas Carol to serve as examples, and they are all sort of a bore. Scrooge's nephew, Fred, has a generalized sort of generosity of spirit and bonhomie, but there isn't much more to him, and the clerk Cratchit and his whole clan are just cloyingly decent folks. This is especially true of that wretched little scamp Tiny Tim, who has no personality at all -- all Dickens gave him was a disability and a tendency to shout adorable things. At least Mrs. Cratchit will occasionally complain about Scrooge, at least until Bob shoots her a withering glance. Scrooge, by comparison, may be gruff and miserly, but he has a fine sense of the ridiculous, enjoys bucking convention, and has a very entertaining tendency to make sport of people. Scrooge is just more fun than any of the other characters, and Dickens punishes him for it. So why does A Christmas Carol work?

Well, I think it's because Dickens had the good sense to give Scrooge some real heartbreak. He spends the largest amount of time with the Ghost of Christmas Past, revisiting his own childhood, and we find out that Scrooge was a lonely boy with a taste for Robert Louis Stephenson, and that he was thrust into an apprenticeship at a very young age, and we watch him lose his sister to illness and his wife to his own ambition and pride. And we watch it with the older Scrooge, who can't stand to watch these things, and weeps as his does. Dickens got these scene sexactly right. We don't necessarily want Scrooge to have a change of heart because we want him to cure Tiny Tim, although Dickens threw Tiny Tim into the story as a pretty blatant act of manipulation. No, if we have any real heart at all, we want Scrooge to change because we see that he's hurt, and we want him to stop hurting and enjoy life a little. For me, at least, this is Dickens' real success in the story, because we have all made bad decisions and all suffered heartbreak as a result, and, as a result, like Scrooge, we all deserve a chance to have a little fun anyway.

I won't go into this too much, but I also suspect people go to A Christmas Carol because it's a dramatization of the Victorian Christmas, and that's still the Christmas we celebrate. It's an almost entirely secular holiday in A Christmas Carol, with almost no mention of the story of Jesus, and it's a season when people get together in small groups with their friends and family, cook a bird, exchange presents, and play games. Sometimes, the characters in A Christmas Carol also go to office parties. We still do all that, and A Christmas Carol explicitly links the holiday to lavish spending and gift giving, as though it is simply impossible to express the season's warmth and goodness except by spending -- a viewpoint that delights both retailers and theater companies alike. Christmas hadn't always been like this, but was turning into it in the Victorian era, and so when we watch Scrooge, were we to talk away the bustle dresses, the plaid sack suits, and replaced Scrooge's cry of "Humbug" with something more modern (I think "horseshit" comes closest), we would be watching ourselves.

And now on to the Guthrie version. They've been doing this play for a very long time, and they do it well, in part because they have the money to make it a really fancy production. This year, the whole of it, on the thrust stage, is acted out before a giant gilded frame that contains an elaborate, cherry colored wooden dual staircase -- sets and props often emerge from this, or disappear into it. Almost all the scene transitions take place during the action of the play, which leads to one very funny moment when Scrooge's curtain-and-four-poster bed disappears into the staircase and Scrooge runs after it, crying out "My bed!" This production, directed by Gary Gisselman, makes extensive but tasteful use of stage effects, including a lot of onstage smoke -- I am convinced that Halloween haunted houses and Christmas productions of A Christmas Carol singlehandedly keep the dry ice business afloat. The ghosts are entertaining in this production, particularly the Ghost of Christmas present, who is played by Bill McCallum with a sort of madcap dash, calling to mind the character Lord Flasheart from the Black Adder shows, who was himself a sort of parody of the cheerful and handsome rogues that Errol Flynn specialized in. In fact, the whole cast is fun, especially longtime Guthrie veteran Richard Ooms, who plays a number of characters, all of them strangely. In one instance, he plays Scrooge's former schoolmaster, and gives the man a strange habit of shrieking and tugging on his own hair during conversations.

Speaking of Scrooge, he is played here by Raye Birk, as he has been for several years, and Birk is a very good Scrooge. First, he looks the part -- he has a high, domde forehead and craggy features, and, with Scrooge's long tonsure of hair and Victorian night gown, Birk looks almost like a cartoon from Punch Magazine. Birk's Scrooge is prankishly mean -- he takes malevolent pleasure in being contrary, although he remains oblivious to how often his contrariness becomes simple bullying. When dragged to the Cratchit family Christmas, he can't help but express his distaste for the Cratchit children, and anyone who publicly dislikes children is all right with me. (There were children at the production I attended, and when the spectral Ghost of Christmas Yet To Come made his appearance, several of them screamed quite loudly, immediately followed by gales of laughter from some of the meaner adult audience members, myself included; I imagine this Scrooge would have approved.) Scrooge's family and employees have a tendency to gossip nastily about him when he is not around, or, at least they do until one of the more sickenly noble characters shuts them up, and Birk's Scrooge listens to them with eagerness -- he's obviously a man who loves being the center of attention, even when that attention is negative. And when Scrooge finally emerges at the other end of Christmas eve a changed man, Birk makes him a full-on eccentric, cackling like a madman, still taking malevolent pleasure in pranks (although his pranks now tend to have generous punchlines), and still glowering and growling at people even as he attempts to be kind to them.

The script for this production is by Barbara Field, and she hews closely to Dickens' original words, to the extent of putting Dickens' narration into the mouths of her cast. She also includes two scenes from the book that are often left out of stage productions, because they are very weird. The first comes when the Ghost of Christmas Present opens his coat to reveal two ghastly children, representing Ignorance and Want. In the book, it is a moment of almost hallucinogenic strangeness, and this production adds to to this by having the two symbolic children emerge from the robe and, joined by others, swarm over Scrooge, stealing his clothes. The production also includes a very bleak scene shown to Scrooge by the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come, in which Scrooge's servants, after his death, fence his belongings to a wretched old man. This scene is exactly the sort of thing Dickens was quite good at -- grotesque tableaux from the lives of London's poor. I don't know why stage productions of A Christmas Carol leave this scene out, as it is a fascinating one; I suspect it is just too bleak for some.

If I have a complaint about the Guthrie production, it is that it is overlong, clocking in at two and a half hours, including intermission. Dickens' original text for A Christmas Carol is quite short, and could be well-adapted to the stage into a 90-minute production. Honestly, I suspect what the Guthrie has is a 90-minute production, but they have padded it out with extended party scenes. If A Christmas Carol is, in part, responsible for keeping manufacturers of dry ice in business, the play must wholly be responsible for a cottage industry of professionals that can teach actors how to do contra dances and Jenny Linds and schottisches and whatever else Victorians danced. We see all of them in this production: With great regularity, the cast leaps onto the stage and performs what looks to be a Victorian hoe-down, clasping arms and do-si-doing around each other, and do we really need to see that much?

But there I am, during the Christmas season, begrudging a play a few dance numbers, and that's the sort of miserliness that calls down ghosts to torment Scrooge.