A couple of weeks ago, as protesters interrupted the annual tree-lighting ceremony in downtown Seattle and families in Christmas sweaters complained bitterly that their holiday tradition was being ruined, the two sides were perfectly dramatizing a 170-year-old tension between two unlikely books: A Christmas Carol and The Communist Manifesto.

Charles Dickens and Karl Marx have a strange kinship. Both walked the same English streets and both were appalled by the squalor—especially in Manchester and London—that inspired their best-known works, which were published within five years of each other, in 1843 and 1848, respectively. (Marx was a Dickens fan, though the line "a specter is haunting Europe" turning up in his Manifesto so soon after the arrival of A Christmas Carol's ghosts may have been coincidental.)

But the two books come to totally different conclusions about what should be done. The Manifesto calls for revolution, saying capitalism necessarily produces poverty. And as we are reminded every December by the inevitable adaptations and perversions of A Christmas Carol—by my count, at least five are running in Seattle right now—the reformist Dickens suggests that if only more rich people had a change of heart like Scrooge, the Tiny Tims of the world could live and thrive.

In the midst of all this Dickensian/Marxist tension, it's refreshing to come across Tiny Tim Is Dead, a 1998 play by Barbara Lebow that needles A Christmas Carol's feel-good conclusions. Set in a homeless encampment in an unnamed American city, it tracks five hard-luck adults—a bitter old drinker, a possibly schizophrenic mother, a good-hearted junkie, a crack-rattled immigrant, and one sober woman who still hopes for a better life—as they fuss and fight through a reenactment of A Christmas Carol for the mentally ill woman's mute son.

But Otis Pope, the sarcastic old drunk, isn't buying it. "Christmas," he says, "is bullshit"—a once-a-year chance for the comfortable and pious to clean their consciences with a few handouts at the local shelters. "Somebody try to buy you off and you fall for it, man," he snarls at the immigrant Filo and the hopeful Azalee. "This stuff all a payoff to they piece of mind. And then they still gonna write it up off they income tax... What these 'nice folk' do for you in January? In September? Look around you, Az. Nothin's gonna change for us."

The rest of the characters dismiss Pope as a Scrooge who can't get into the spirit of the season—if they're sentimental Dickensians, he's the coldly analytical Marxist who refuses to be placated with the annual distribution of a few Christian crumbs. (Pope could even quote the Manifesto on this point: "Nothing is easier than to give Christian asceticism a Socialist tinge... Christian Socialism is but the holy water with which the priest consecrates the heart-burnings of the aristocrat.")

Actor Malcolm West plays Pope with bristling, bah-humbug indignation, in sharp contrast to the morose charity of the junkie (Jaryl Draper), the stubborn optimism of Azalee (Laura Steele), and the frenetic, volcanic joy of the immigrant (Matthew Sherrill). Joanna Beecher maintains a synapse-blowing intensity as the scattered mother Verna. As her tiny, mute son, Arthur Clemens is appropriately cute and forlorn.

Tiny Tim Is Dead doesn't offer a transcendent performance experience—both the text and the performances are stable but have their workmanlike qualities, and Zachariah Robinson's direction never quite achieves escape velocity. Nor is it a Marxist critique of Dickens, per se. Still, it's a welcome corrective to the anodyne myths of the Christmas season. Of course, there's nothing wrong with putting in extra hours at soup kitchens and donating mittens and boots to shelters in late December. But, as Pope asks his homeless neighbors, "What happens the next day after that story over?" recommended