To fans of “A Christmas Story,” nothing says Christmas like shooting your eye out.
Actors Theatre of Louisville triple-dog-dares you to start your holiday season early with a stage adaptation of Jean Shepherd’s wickedly funny film. Directed by associate artistic director Sean Daniels, this nostalgic account of a man’s favorite childhood Christmas promises to be a faithful adaptation of the pop-culture classic.
“So many people know the movie, they can quote the movie, and I can imagine they will start to giggle as the flagpole comes out,” said Daniels, referencing a key scene from the movie that will also appear in the play.
The 1983 film chronicles the Christmas trials of Ralphie, a boy who wants nothing more than the official Red Ryder carbine-action two-hundred-shot range model air rifle (with a compass in the stock!) despite all cautions that he will surely shoot his eye out with the toy.
Writer Jean Shepherd’s account of Christmas in a 1940s middle-class Indiana neighborhood is both heartfelt and unsentimental, as Ralphie recounts his triumphant quest for the perfect toy and his many humiliations, calamities and personal defeats along the way.
“A Christmas Story” is chock-full of memorable images: little brother Randy bundled up so tight he can’t move his arms, their father (known as the Old Man) fighting with the furnace, Ralphie wearing a deranged bunny suit.
Randy Bolton, the buyer at Ear X-tacy, loves the movie for its “insane and surreal” depiction of an ordinary Midwestern childhood. He relishes the scene where Ralphie, desperate to relate his rifle request to a department store Santa Claus, climbs back up the display slide to squeak out his plea, only to be kicked back down by the jolly old elf.
“The viciousness of the boot, that’s hysterical to me,” Bolton said.
If there is an iconic image from “A Christmas Story,” it is the “leg lamp.” Shaped like a woman’s leg clad in a fishnet stocking, it is the fragile (or, in the words of Ralphie’s father, “Fra-gee-lay”) prize won by the Old Man in a newspaper trivia contest. It’s a scene Todd Brashear, owner of Wild and Woolly Video, knows well. During the Christmas season, he decorates the front window of his Highlands store with a replica of the garish lamp.
“When I first put it out a few years ago, within five minutes there was a kid sticking his hand up the leg of the lamp, just like in the movie,” Brashear laughed. “It was too perfect.”
Brashear’s display, which includes a Red Ryder BB gun, “always gets a ton of attention,” he said, citing the annual 24-hour “A Christmas Story” marathon on TBS as reinforcement for the film’s enduring popularity.
“It’s a smartly done movie that everybody can relate to,” Bolton said. “It reminds people of their own childhoods, like the dad who sat around reading the paper pretending to pay attention to us.”
A play so rich in memorable moments and quotable lines is both a blessing and a curse. Audiences love the source material, but will they welcome a stage adaptation?
The way was clear to Daniels. “They don’t want to see your German existentialist version,” he laughed. “There’s a promise that is made to the audience about the kind of experience they’re going to have that’s based on the movie, and you have to come through on that.”
Like Bolton, Daniels is a devotee of the movie, and he brings a fan’s eye for detail to the production. He promises most of the memorable scenes will be included, from the frozen flagpole to Ralphie dropping the “F-dash-dash-dash word.”
“People seem to have never heard of it before, or can recite every line to you, and I grew up in one of those families where you recite every line,” he said. “I always liked the scene with Randy snorting like a pig and shoving food all over himself. We have a wonderful 6-year-old in our production who’s an excellent snorter.”
The cast of seven children and four adults includes Alex Underwood as young Ralphie and Liam Craig as grown-up Ralph, who narrates the show and provides the wry reflection movie lovers will recognize from Shepherd’s voiceovers in the movie.
In order to fit the show’s many locations on one stage, Daniels and his crew have made Ralphie’s house the centerpiece of the set, with pieces like the classroom desks moved on and off by a crew dressed as Santa’s elves.
“Because the play is taking place in Ralphie’s memory, all the colors are a little brighter than they would normally be,” Daniels said. “Everything is a little bit stronger than you remember it.”
The Old Man gets an Oldsmobile adapted from a golf cart, pivotal to the scene in which he blows a tire and performs his rapid-fire pit stop. And, of course, the leg lamp will be on prominent display.
The flipside of a faithful adaptation is the challenge to bring something new to the experience. Otherwise, why see in the theater what you can watch on cable?
“If you stage it just like the movie, then I don’t think you’ve given people a reason to get up off their couch and come see it,” Daniels explained. “You have to figure out the theatrical version of a cinematic language.”
ATL’s interpretation, which runs through Nov. 29 in the Pamela Brown Auditorium, includes two dance numbers to help ease transitions when the crew transforms Ralphie’s home into the department store Santaland, as well as a touch of tap dancing not found in the original script.
“Getting all of Santaland on stage is hard,” Daniels said. “So instead of trying to pretend like there isn’t a giant set coming on stage, we thought we’d embrace the idea, and when people come out and set it, they burst into dance. We don’t have jump cuts. We have to roll scenery on stage. So you can either act like you’re not rolling scenery on stage or you can embrace it and run with it.”
Seeing “A Christmas Story” live also creates a communal experience not easily replicated at home.
“Laughing with a large group of people is different from laughing alone,” Daniels said. “When we land a joke well and 500 people laugh, that’s a very different experience than sitting at home watching Netflix and giggling to yourself.”
