Charles Dickens’ "A Christmas Carol" has been presented on stage as a period piece and a contemporary fable, as a play-within-a-play, a one-man play and a musical; it’s been done with a female scrooge and with touches of the morality play and the commedia dell’arte; it’s been played for laughs and rendered dark.

Actor/director Caroline Shaffer wondered what it would look like using Dickens’ 1843 story itself as the script, as does the version that opened Thursday at Oregon Stage Works in Ashland.

This is not your father’s adaptation. With Bob McCracken as Scrooge and five other actors in the other roles, the players speak Dickens’ narrative and descriptive passages, even attributions, in addition to the dialogue.

The results are often funny. When Scrooge comes into his office, the door is Brandy Carson, and the Victorian chair he sits on is Kate Sullivan.

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It’s odd to hear actors include attribution with the lines they speak. Wished a merry Christmas by his nephew, Scrooge says, "Bah!" then he says, "said Scrooge." Actors say " ... said Mrs. Cratchit," or " ... exclaimed the ghost" and so on.

Instead of seeing McCracken/Scrooge taking his dinner in the tavern, we hear him say, "Scrooge took his melancholy dinner in his usual melancholy tavern ... "

Glenn Hill’s spare stage invites us to fill in the blanks. There are no sets or props but for a couple of hat racks for the scarves and coats the actors use as they change characters. An abstract, painted backdrop suggests winter snow, or maybe foggy London, or maybe night air filled with phantoms.

Just as radio drama once asked listeners to use their imaginations in a way that television does not, Hill’s set forces us to consult our inner Dickens, as it were. Combined with the play of G. Crane Coleman’s lights and Todd Barton’s music, the result is a sort of extreme participation. We "see" the story in our mind’s eye, as if we’re reading a good book.

Using fiction directly as the book for a stage production is not new. The Word-For-Word Theater Company in San Francisco, for one, is based on the concept. Stories can be cut for length, but nothing is added to the authors’ original words. Short story writer Tobias Wolff, whose writing has been presented by Word for Word, calls it a new art form.

It also can be dicey. John Steinbeck tried it, more or less, with "Of Mice and Men," and it was a flop. He turned the thing over to playwright George Kaufman, whose conventional adaptation was a hit and is still performed.

Here it works. For one thing, Dickens’ story is built of a series of set pieces that lend themselves well to the stage with no major restructuring.

And McCracken finds surprising depths in Scrooge. Orion J. Bradshaw, Carson, Joel Handley, Shayna Marie and Sullivan ably fill the roles of Marley’s ghost, various Cratchits, lesser characters and an assortment of doors, chairs, Scrooge’s bed and so on.

All the players are dressed in dark clothes, and their stark look and the spare stage are congruent with the unfolding of the story with no director imposing himself between us and Dickens. We feel a sense of closeness with the author, a sort of surprising intimacy.

That’s not the same as saying it seems necessary for actors to voice attributions, and I’m not sure the narration wouldn’t be better left to a narrator. Still, this is fresh, and it’s fun.

Thursday’s performance began in a party atmosphere with caroling and hot spiced cider.

"A Christmas Carol" runs through Dec. 23 at Oregon Stage Works in the A Street Market Place, Oak and A streets, Ashland. Call 482-2334.

Reach reporter Bill Varble at 776-4478 or e-mail bvarble@mailtribune.com