Mrs. Bob Cratchit’s Wild Christmas Binge

In Durang’s version of the beloved holiday classic, Mrs. Bob Cratchit, a minor character, takes center stage. No longer loving and long suffering, Mrs. Bob is in a rage: She’s sick of Tiny Tim (the goody-goody crippled child), she hates her 20 other children (most of them confined to the root cellar), and she wants to get drunk and jump off London Bridge. Scrooge’s exclamations of “Bah, humbug!” are an undiagnosed “kind of seasonal Tourette’s Syndrome,” and the Dickens tale of redemption and gentle grace is placed squarely on its head.