BY KAREN BOSSICK

Fancy a little Christmas as summer starts up?

You’ll find it in Colin McPherson’s “Dublin Carol.”

Sawtooth Productions is staging a free play reading in association with Laughing Stock Theatre at 6:30 p.m. Thursday, May 30, at The Argyros Performing Arts Center in Ketchum. Complimentary wine and cookies will be served.

The play revolves around a Dublin undertaker named John whose best friend—or worst enemy, rather—is the bottle. It’s Christmas Eve and he must decide whether to turn over a new life.

He’s been rescued once—by his employer who now lies dying in the hospital. And his daughter, whom he hasn’t seen for 10 years, has arrived to tell him that his ex-wife has terminal cancer.

The 80-minute play, which The Guardian called “a devastating portrait of loneliness delivered in prose that glimmers and glows,” presents a devastating character study of an alcoholic at the end of his line as John tells how he poured his life away.

It’s painfully beautiful—"both brutal and tender, as gentle as it is harsh,” said a reviewer for Variety.

“McPherson is one of Ireland’s great playwrights and he has woven a beautifully moving tale of redemption set on Christmas Eve in Dublin,” said Director Jon Kane.

The cast features Andrew Alburger, Kagen Albright and Charlotte Hemmings.

McPherson also wrote “The Weir,” a ghostly tale that revolves around three reminiscing Irishmen who attempt to spook a newcomer from Dublin but end up frightening themselves.

“Dublin Carol” opened in the Royal Court Theatre in London in 2000. It opened Off-Broadway in 2003 and was staged by the Steppenwolf Theatre Company of Chicago eight years later.