’Tis the Season … for ‘Mrs. Bob Cratchit’s Wild Christmas Binge’
Expect Laughs and Some Twists with the SBCC Student Showcase Production of a Christopher Durang Comedy
Christopher Durang, Tony-winning playwright of Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike, passed away last April. In a celebration of his work — absurd, fatalistic comedies of aggressively dysfunctional relationships — the SBCC student showcase kicks off the holiday season with one of Durang’s lesser-produced works, Mrs. Bob Cratchit’s Wild Christmas Binge. In this Durang take on A Christmas Carol, Scrooge exists in the same universe as Enron’s Ken Lay and Jeff Skilling, and real estate tycoons Leona and Harry Helmsley.
In Christmas Binge, Mrs. Cratchit is not the gentle, god-fearing housewife you remember from Dickens’s original work. She is fed up with the harsh realities of poverty in 19th-century London. When Scrooge’s midnight ride with his ghost guide brings him to the Cratchits’ life of squalor, it sparks an interesting connection. “The play centers around Mrs. Cratchit, whose life is awful. Disconnected from family, poverty, all these children her beleaguered husband keeps bringing home randomly … she’s had it up to here. And Tiny Tim, usually the heart and pure soul of A Christmas Carol, is insufferable and unbearable,” says director Katie Laris. “And into that awful reality comes Scrooge, who’s a kindred soul, and she feels a sense of connection to him through space and time.”
Like in Dickens’s story, the ghost guide in Christmas Binge is desperately trying to create a path to salvation for the sins of the old miser, but Durang’s version sends that redemption story off track almost immediately. Says Laris, “As humans, we want redemption, but in 2024, we see all around us that it’s not always the case.”
See the show at the Jurkowitz Theater on the Santa Barbara City College campus November 13-23. “Hopefully we’ll all be in a good mood,” says Laris of the post-election opening date. “Either way, the theater is a place for us to come together and laugh.”
Tickets can be purchased online at theatregroupsbcc.com or by calling the box office at (805) 965-5935.
Grace Wilson and AJ DeAugustine in the SBCC Theatre Arts Department’s production of MRS. BOB CRATCHIT’S WILD CHRISTMAS BINGE, by Christopher Durang, directed by Katie Laris. | Photo: Ben Crop 
Ciara Barnes, AJ DeAugustine, Grace Wilson and Tristan Fleming in the SBCC Theatre Arts Department’s production of MRS. BOB CRATCHIT’S WILD CHRISTMAS BINGE, by Christopher Durang, directed by Katie Laris. | Photo: Ben Crop
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