STAGE : I’m Dreaming of a Dark Christmas : Modern holiday plays are short on comfort and joy

Christmas is good theater. The stable, the shepherds, the angels, the Christmas star and the three kings still make a brave pageant, whether at the Crystal Cathedral or your local Sunday School. “Behold I bring you tidings of great joy,” pipes a heavenly visitor in his cardboard wings. Probably half the actors in America started this way.

Then there is “A Christmas Carol.” It has become the Christmas play over the last 20 years, being both uplifting and non-sectarian. Charles Dickens thrilled British and American audiences with his reading of the tale. British actor Patrick Stewart revived that tradition at UCLA last weekend. More often “A Christmas Carol” is done with a full company, in a rather too quaint style. Audiences don’t care. If you want to fill your theater at the holidays, call Scrooge.

Of modern Christmas classics, there are few. One would think that some playwright would have devised a cheerful Christmas fable akin to “It’s a Wonderful Life” by now, but nobody has.

We do have Thornton Wilder’s “The Long Christmas Dinner.” It was revived in Los Angeles this season by the Pacific Theatre Ensemble, which added carols and hot cider to make the event more Christmasy. In fact, the play isn’t so much a celebration of the holidays as an observation of the way families gather at such times, with the tribe changing a little every year, losing a member or gaining one.

Wilder folds 90 Christmas dinners into one, the characters “aging” before our eyes (donning wigs) and leaving the scene through a door that stands for death.

It is a gentle play, but not a sentimental one. In this family, the losses outnumber the gains and at the end there’s only one figure at the table, a bent old lady. For Wilder it was perfectly possible that the human line might die out one day, either like the dinosaurs or all in a flash.

Not a very cheerful message. But then most modern playwrights don’t view Christmas cheerfully. Alan Ayckbourn loves to use Christmas gatherings to illustrate the folly of all social intercourse. Robert Anderson’s “Silent Night, Lonely Night” shows the pain of the holidays when one is in exile from his or her marriage. Kaufman and Hart’s “The Man Who Came to Dinner” reminds us how dangerous the holidays can be. Be careful on those front steps, Mr. Whiteside! Oh, no!

Even musicals have their doubts about Christmas. “She Loves Me” approves of it, if not of the smug people who have their shopping done by August. But “Promises, Promises” not only makes the holidays look bleak, it makes them look sinister--specifically, in that tacky office party with the three boogalooing secretaries.

Truman Capote’s “A Christmas Memory” isn’t a dark tale, as adapted by Madeline Puzo for the Mark Taper Forum’s Literary Cabaret. It’s about a little boy and an old lady who make a fine Christmas for themselves, despite their spoilsport relations. But it is sad to hear what became of the woman and to recall what became of the boy--Capote himself.

Maybe such feelings aren’t out of key at a time of year when we are bound to remember Christmases past. Maybe here’s even a kind of comfort in them. (“Sad things aren’t the same as depressing things,” says Lucia in “The Long Christmas Dinner.”) But it must be bitter to look under the Christmas tree and find nothing but disgust, like Vince in William Inge’s “Natural Affection” at the Zephyr Theatre.

Vince is getting up to 50, and “there’s nothing I like anymore. Everything’s ugly. The new cars. The new buildings. I haven’t felt at home in a house since I was a kid. I just been living in empty rooms. . . .”

Earlier there’s a scene where a disturbed teen-ager gives his mother a hand-made Christmas gift. He’s suddenly so sure that it’s “crummy” that he tries to snatch it back from her.

Before that, the mother’s lover opens his gift from the mother and discovers that it’s--an electric shoe-polisher.

SUE: Like it?

BERNIE: (He doesn’t). I like it OK.

SUE: I’ll take it back and get you a gift certificate.

BERNIE: No, I’ll keep it. Maybe I can polish shoes for a living.

SUE: Now you’re just trying to depress me.

BERNIE: Maybe I’m a li’l depressed myself. Christmas Eve and I’m out of a job.

The soldiers in Patrick Maiello and Victoria Hartman’s “Monsoon Christmas,” at the Lex Theatre, also spend a lousy Christmas Eve on the rain-swept island of Okinawa. They play cards in front of a jerry-built tree and snarl at each other. They’ll do worse by the final curtain.

Tennessee Williams’ “Period of Adjustment” is set on Christmas Eve as well, in a house in the suburbs. The stockings are hung by the chimney with care, but the house is slowly sinking into an underground cavern.

Likewise the marriages of the two war buddies in the story. The first man’s wife has just gone home to mother. The second one’s wife spent their honeymoon last night sitting in a chair. The situation is resolved when somebody spends more than he can afford for a Christmas present. Williams calls this a “comedy,” but it’s not a jolly one.

Anne Commire’s “Shay” takes place on the day after Christmas. It starts as a brash sitcom about a gabby mother who turns shy around strangers. But when Shay grabs a razor blade, we see that the holidays can set up more tension than some souls can bear.

David Edgar’s adaptation of “Nicholas Nickleby” ends with the jolliest, most Dickensian of Christmases. But then Nicholas sees a starved little boy outside the window, identical to his poor dead friend Smike.

He picks up the boy and turns to the audience, a look of helplessness of his face. The carol is true: It’s a time of “comfort and joy.” But what do we do about this ?

And again we’re back in the stable.