Acting in the Spirit of Christmas : Through their shows, two men send out a reminder that the holiday is a time for loving, sharing and helping.

NORTH HOLLYWOOD — What is Christmas? That’s a question with a lot of answers, depending on how you look at the holiday, the most tradition-packed in the year. Two of those answers make up American Renegade Theatre’s holiday show, “Next Stop . . . Christmas.”

C.J. Bau’s nostalgic autobiographical remembrances in his one-man “A Pittston Christmas” give one answer.

The other is director Barry Thompson’s choice of “A Christmas Carol.” But this is not an ordinary version of the Charles Dickens classic. A one-act, abridged adaptation, it was written in 1938 by Cora Wilson Greenwood for a group called The Modern Club of Philadelphia. Long before non-traditional casting became a catch-phrase, in an era when men already played women’s roles and vice-versa, Greenwood’s production featured an all-female cast.

She even used children from a local Philadelphia settlement house. A socially conscious production, to be sure. Thompson’s more traditional casting, with a few additions to the script from Dickens, makes this staging also socially conscious, at least as far as the spirit of the piece goes.

“Dickens was trying to show,” Thompson explains, “what avarice can do to a man when he becomes greedy and clutching, and wants money, money, money.”

The director’s conception shifts away from that: It isn’t just about money. And his own input, he maintains, certainly isn’t just about money.

Thompson says, “It’s about what happens when a person makes a wrong choice, and realizes it, but hasn’t been able to extricate himself from that. My Scrooge is more about summing up himself, with half of it coming from someplace else, the world reaching out to him, and Scrooge reaching out to the world. It’s a little more metaphysical than just a dream that shakes him out of all this.”

For some people, Thompson feels, there are similar pains at Christmas to those Dickens describes, and, in a way, his staging addresses those. “It’s a time when people remember people out of their past, friends missing. It’s a good kind of pain, too, because we remember missing family members, and realize that they are very much still with us, who they were and what they did, and the lessons we can learn from them.”

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Thompson lists a recurring role on television’s “Reasonable Doubts” and “Tales from the Crypt” among his acting credits, and his directing career has included work at New York’s Ensemble Studio Theatre. He is also acting as “a third eye” in the staging of Bau’s solo piece.

Bau, who is on American Renegade’s supervisory board and is co-founder of the group’s Foundry Series of new plays, also mentions the pain that sometimes accompanies Christmas.

“Because of the commercial pressures,” Bau states, “a lot of families can’t cope with it. They can’t give their kids the presents they see on television.”

Bau recalls going through that kind of period when he was a teen-ager in Pittston, Pa. “We were up against it financially,” he says. “There were a few Christmases that weren’t terribly pleasant and were really grinding on the spirit.”

But they would ultimately end up well, he remembers, because of his family. It’s the family that he began writing about when he took up the pen in a writers group a few years ago. Originally he wanted to write about his “adventures as a young rogue traveling across the country in my Austin-Healey,” but his Italian family kept popping in along with memories of growing up. His family--with one brother and one sister--was small by Italian standards, but weddings, funerals and especially Christmas were full of relatives, kids and aunts and uncles.

Bau says, “And I discovered, growing up, that Italians aren’t all that different, as I got to know Jewish families, and Russian and Irish families. The same kind of thing exists.”

The stories he has to tell, he says, “are not specifically Christmas stories. But in my mind, they kind of are, because they have that feeling about them. They come with gifts. Christmas is a state of mind. A state of being.”

“Just like ‘A Christmas Carol,’ ” Thompson adds. “It reminds us and brings us back to that thing--that it’s not about the money, it’s not about getting crazy and buying presents. It’s about a spirit of helping, spirit of sharing. What it all comes down to is the love of fellow man, and certainly your family. In today’s times, we forget that.”

Where and When What: “Next Stop . . . Christmas.” Location: American Renegade Theatre, 11305 Magnolia Blvd., North Hollywood. Hours: 8 p.m. Fridays and Saturdays. 7 p.m. Thursdays and Sundays. Ends Dec. 19. Price: $5 to $10. Call: (818) 763-4430.