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The Bedlam Theatre has created a piece of dinner theater for their Christmas show, which they have named The Turducken, after a rather absurd holiday invention that consists of a de-boned turkey stuffed with a de-boned duck, which, in turn, is stuffed with a small de-boned chicken, all of which is then filled with stuffing and sometimes sausage. Sometimes this whole monstrosity of bird meat is then deep fried.

As you might expect from a play named after such an absurd creation, the Bedlam's production, scripted by Josef Evans, is heavy on the ridiculous. They've decided to pretend to be a legitimate dinner theater in the midst of a meltdown. Their cast and crew are drunk and rebelling, and, to make matters worse, they are rebelling against a genuinely terribly idea for a Christmas play: a musical theater update of Anton Chekhov's morose drama The Seagull. The update is wretched and un-Christmasy, somehow managing only to retain the essential cruelty of Chekhov's text but mangling every other detail. For instance, The Seagull's relationship between the aging Soren and his actress sister Arkadina has here been transformed into a sibling rivalry between a former potato sack manufacturer who wants to start his own Renaissance Festival and his sister Wakadinga, who performs a Puke and Snot-style routine at the actual Renaissance Festival. The brother, MuckleJohn, is played by a woman, Maren Ward, and tends toward telling obtuse bodily function jokes and then playing a pan flute. The sister, Wakadinga, is played by a man, Don Mabley-Allen, and she speaks with a thick Russian accent (the only one in the play to do so) and carries herself like a mixture of Zsa Zsa Gabor and an ancient Gypsy in a horror film. One of them goes through gender reassignment surgery midway through the play and becomes a lounge singer. With this sort of script, who wouldn't get drunk and rebel?

This approach to theater can be quite exhausting, as the structure gives the company an excuse simply to mock genre conventions and to pass off bad work as a parody of bad work. To the Bedlam's credit, they are just too weird for that. Yes, there is some tweaking of our expectations in attending dinner theater, particularly in the form of a round-faced, bearded man in a green Santa coat with white collar and cuffs, a garland of leaves and berries around his shaved head. He is introduced as Grandpa Christmas, and is our Emcee for the night, and he is evidently very drunk (the whole show, we are told, is sponsored by a cheap beer, and characters are constantly seen holding tall cans of suds). As played by Jason Vogen, he has a grand, mellifluous voice and a bewildered and occasionally surly demeanor -- he opens the show with a Christmas song about the possibility of dying during the holidays, and occasionally weakly attempts to interact with the audience, which he informs us he is contractually obligated to do. "Where are you from?" he asks one person. Upon hearing the response, he blearily nods. "Many people come from there," he says, and then wanders away.

For the most part, the Bedlam steers clear of simply parodying the conventions of dinner theater Christmas shows, using The Turducken as an opportunity for inventive clowning, and this is one of their strong points. They have on hand some very, very funny performers. There is, for instance, a fellow named Christopher Allen, who plays a character named Bobby, who the play treats as though he is a genuine celebrity in the real world who has graciously agreed to participate in this musical Christmas play, and, as a result, has woven the story of his rise to fame into the revised Seagull. He's a thin fellow with a blond mullet, a nose ring, expressive eyes (and a taste for winking at audience members), and a tendency to just start screaming when he is upset, which is often. He prowls the stage, putting the moves on a tortured playwright (Jon Cole), looking like a junior high school boy who has learned his seduction techniques from watching repeats of Showgirls. I believe he is supposed to be the play's version of the schoolteacher Medvedenko from The Seagull, but, honestly, at this point, who can tell? Whatever he is supposed to be, Allen is outrageously funny.

If the play suffers from anything, it is, quite often, too scattershot in its approach to comedy -- the play never settles into a clear satiric groove, instead simply following every outrageous impulse that pops up. But this is praising with a faint damning. Perhaps sometimes The Turducken tosses out a scene that falls flat, or is simply incomprehensible (and there are a few of these), but if the resulting play can be frustratingly messy, it is also gloriously messy. There are a lot of Christmas plays around town right now, many of them annual productions, resulting in theater that has had all its rough edges smoothed down and every little detail perfected. Attending one of these is a bit like going to a formal Christmas dinner, and there is nothing wrong with that, but every so often you want to get a little drunk and a little crazy for the holidays.

The Turducken plays through December 21 at the Bedlam Theatre, 612-338-9817.