A Klingon Christmas Carol

[rhoenix]

I thought this was hilariously nerdy, enough to post.

CHICAGO—Across the country this week, productions of Charles Dickens' "A Christmas Carol" are warming hearts. In this city, one version poses this question: What if Charles Dickens were a Trekkie?

The answer runs an hour and 20 minutes and includes three fight scenes, 17 actors with latex ridges glued to their foreheads and a performance delivered entirely in Klingon—a language made up for a Star Trek movie.

"It's like an opera," says Christopher O. Kidder, the director and co-writer. "You know what's happening because you already know the story."

For those not fluent in Klingon, English translations are projected above the stage.

The arc of "A Klingon Christmas Carol" follows the familiar Dickens script: An old miser is visited on a hallowed night by three ghosts who shepherd him through a voyage of self-discovery. The narrative has been rejiggered to match the Klingon world view.

For starters, since there is neither a messiah nor a celebration of his birth on the Klingon planet of Kronos, the action is pegged to the Klingon Feast of the Long Night. Carols and trees are replaced with drinking, fighting and mating rituals. And because Klingons are more concerned with bravery than kindness, the main character's quest is for courage.

Klingons first appeared on the Star Trek television series in the 1960s. They were a brutish, warlike species who dramatized hostilities between the U.S. and the Soviet Union in the Cold War, Mr. Kidder says. As political tensions eased, the characters morphed into noble warriors, who live according to a strict code.

In 1984, producers of "Star Trek III: The Search for Spock," incorporated Klingons into the screenplay and asked Marc Okrand, a linguist with an expertise in Native American languages, to create dialogue for the movie. Mr. Okrand created a 2000-word language that could be expanded by compounding words.

Mr. Okrand thought the Klingon dictionary, published as part of the marketing campaign, was little more than an oddity that might find its way to the attics of a few Star Trek fans. Wrong: It has been through more than 20 reprints and sold over 300,000 copies.

After its founding in 1992, the Klingon Language Institute, based in Blue Bell, Pa., began publishing quarterly newsletters and hosting an annual conference. Attendees wear ridges fixed to their foreheads, sashes and knee-high boots, and compete in game shows in Klingon.

"Outsiders think it's weird," says Lawrence Schoen, founder and director of the KLI. "But it's no different than walking into a sports bar where everyone knows the score of the third game of the 1982 World Series."

Today, there are roughly 40 fluent Klingon speakers and tens of thousands of people who are conversant. Klingon is listed on the language bars on Google and Facebook. The Bible, Hamlet and Gilgamesh have all been translated.

In 2006, a member of Commedia Beauregard, a St. Paul, Minn., theater company that specializes in foreign-language plays, jokingly suggested performing "A Christmas Carol" in Klingon.

"But the more we thought about it, the more it made sense," Mr. Kidder says. It was quirky and potentially marketable in a season when earnestness is the order of the day.

It took six months for Mr. Kidder to write the screenplay in Klingon. The KLI returned the first page of his draft with 17 corrections.

Mr. Kidder initially solicited fans at Star Trek conventions and Vikings football games, since both events tend to attract people who like to dress up, wear makeup and root for something aggressive, he says.

Last year in St. Paul, the performances sold out. This season the play—now in its fourth year—expanded to Chicago. To prepare actors, a fluent Klingon speaker flew in from Kentucky. Stunt-training sessions prepared the cast to master bar-room brawls.

On Thursday night, in Chicago's Lincoln Park neighborhood, the audience of about 120 included several University of Chicago students, two self-described Mensa club members and Marc and Julie Malnekoff, a husband and wife who drove an hour to see the show for the second time.

Mr. Malnekoff, a 46-year-old drugstore manager, wore brown L'Oreal liquid face makeup to darken his skin and match his forehead ridges and a long, dark wig. His costume—from the Klingon Assault Group, a fan group—included a homemade holster for a Klingon knife.

"It brings out your dark side, your inner warrior," Mr. Malnekoff said of his costume. "I love what Klingons represent—honor, integrity and bravery. I think that's in short supply right now."

Sitting in the third row was Mr. Okrand. He demurred when asked if he was the father of the language. "Maybe facilitator is a better word," he said.

During the performance, Mr. Okrand, 62, laughed out loud at Klingon puns. The word for alcoholic is "HIq," pronounced "hick"; the word for blood is 'Iw' pronounced "eew." As the play progressed, SQuja' (Klingon for Scrooge) cringes as he travels back in time to watch his cowardly boyhood self avoid fights and lose the woman he loves. He skirts the Klingon "Rite of Ascension," a trip down the River of Blood.

But as SQuja' drinks the Ale of Klingon Courage with the ghost from the present, he begins to see the error of his ways. As the specter of death from the future points a finger to his lonely fate, he pledges to fulfill his warrior spirit.

In the finale, Tiny Tim's canonical line: "God bless us, everyone!" is replaced with "We are Klingons!" Mr. Okrand clapped exuberantly.

"I was on deadline, so I wrote the language in a couple months," he said later. "I had no idea it would become this, this thing. It's amazing."

His marching orders were to make the language sound guttural and bellicose but also make it easy for actors to learn.

Occasionally, as demand piles up, he adds new words to the Klingon lexicon. He is the only one with the authority to do so. "I'm like the Academie Francaise of Klingon," he said, referring to the French scholars whose role is to protect the purity of the language.

When he adds new words, he says he hears them in his mind the way they would be uttered by Christopher Lloyd, among the first actors to speak Klingon.

"He spoke them differently than I intended," he said. "Not better or worse, just different. To me, that's Klingon."

That's just hilariously awesome.