'A Klingon Christmas Carol' attracts national attention

We’re exiting the season of Christmas plays, but before it ends altogether, we thought we should note one in particular that attracted a lot of attention. We speak of Commedia Beauregard’s “A Klingon Christmas Carol,” which debuted its unusual blend of Charles Dickens and popular science fiction in 2007. It’s a sort of ingenious play, in that it so thoroughly targets a specific niche audience -- it’s a very specific crowd that would be attracted to a play performed almost entirely in an invented alien tongue, translated with supertitles, like at an opera. But there are a lot of “Star Trek” fans out there, and they’re in a unique position to enjoy a play that transposes the story of Scrooge into a culture where Scrooge’s ill-temper and general unpleasantness would be considered attractive. In a delicious reversal of the original story, this play’s Scrooge starts out a coward and must be transformed into somebody we humans might not want to spend Christmas with. The play enjoyed a production in Chicago this year, and suddenly found itself mentioned on TIME Magazine’s website, The Atlantic Wire, The Telegraph, boingboing, The Wall Street Journal, the popular science fiction site io9, and, perhaps most impressively, Trek Today. Playwright Tom Poole offered his reactions to "A Klingon Christmas Carol" back in 2009 here on MinnesotaPlaylist. We might not have gone where no man has gone before, but we got there before TIME Magazine, and that’s something.