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The holiday season can suck sometimes. All the tidings of comfort and joy can ring hollow to those of us struggling with loneliness, loss, marginalization, or a rough patch of plain ol’ humbug. How can it really be the happiest time of year when our own suffering doesn’t take a holiday break?

Don’t worry, Houston. Alley Theatre understands you.

Playwright Isaac Gómez’s The Night Shift Before Christmas made its world premiere at Alley Theatre on December 5 and runs until December 29. Directed by KJ Sanchez, this one-person show stars Briana J. Resa as Margot, a frustrated fast-food worker at the fictional Happy Burger. She voluntarily works solo during the Christmas Eve shift, frying up orders in under 90 seconds, trading barbs with drive-through customers, and shooing away a homeless person trying to stay warm on a rare cold Houston night.

And then she’s possessed by the spirit of her dead friend and coworker.

“The Night Shift before Christmas is an adult Christmas Carol,” Sanchez says. “It's funny. It's moving. It's just raunchy enough for a fun night out with a little cocktail, which you can bring into the theater with you.”

As the sole performer, Resa embodies Margot, the four ghosts, and the auxiliary characters within the ghosts’ stories. Orlando Arriaga provides environmental voiceovers, but does not appear live. Clever costume changes and staging indicate which ghost is present to provide advice. (The first possession is especially striking, almost appearing as a levitation with carefully choreographed push-pull movements revealing chain necklaces and pink hair extensions.) But Resa’s performance keeps The Night Shift Before Christmas grounded in place.

“What I love about Margot is that she represents a modern-day Scrooge… She's an everyday girl. She's working at a fast-food restaurant. And how many of us have been there?” Resa says. “I love the tie-in that makes her recognizable to so many of the people that are going to walk off the street and walk into the theater. And she is a bit of a Scrooge, because life is tough, right? Things happen and we have to feel.”

Gómez was heavily involved in the production as well. Originally hailing from El Paso/Ciudad Juárez, they consulted with the Alley’s Hispanic advocacy group El Zócalo to add Houston-specific touches like an El Bolillo namedrop and Happy Burger’s implied rivalry with Whataburger. Margot was written specifically for Resa, with script changes made to better showcase her prodigious performing skills.

“It's such a privilege to work on new works with the playwright… It feels like walking out in the most tailored and fitted-to-you outfit you can imagine. So being part of the process, being at the table, being part of those conversations, it gives you such a sense of community around that piece,” Resa says. “Isaac is able to not necessarily incorporate all the ideas, but incorporate ideas that work for the play… That's really, really special and unique, and something that is hard to come by.”

Within the mundane confines of Happy Burger, with a bright-yellow smiley face persistently hovering above like a deranged warden, Resa grapples with Margot’s hitherto unresolved trauma. She crafts unique postures and voices for each character, sometimes snapping back and forth between them at a split-second pace when Gómez’s script necessitates. The careful timing and precision required for such a demanding role as Margot only works when in the tremendously experienced and capable hands of a team on par with the Alley Theatre.

“There's a lot of magic in the show. What I mean by that is, the way that the characters appear and the costumes they have, there's a lot of theatrical magic in it. So it was really fun for me. It's a burger joint, and we had the challenge of figuring out how to actually cook burgers on stage. I love fun puzzles like that,”  Sanchez says.

Burgers and fries really are prepared right there on the floor, filling the Alley’s Neuhaus Stage with the fragrance of grease and meat, the sizzle of a quick Christmas Eve meal. It adds an impressive layer to the atmosphere of an already masterful production, while underscoring Margot’s self-imposed alienation. She turns down a family function to instead serve an increasingly belligerent public, her only company a few grilled onions, hamburger buns that fall to the floor, and an ominous Santa Claus decoration dancing and talking at the worst possible times. The monotony and slowly mounting claustrophobia comforts Margot as she escapes the guilt, grief, and pain of a Christmas gone by.

“If you're a smaller family, or everybody else seems cheerful and happy, and if you don't have that, it can make you cranky,” Sanchez says.

The Night Shift Before Christmas needs to be a one-person show for this reason. It focuses on the raw truth that Christmas isn’t always the festive feast of smiles and mirth it’s branded as. Margot isn’t a Dickensian spendthrift whose wealth and avarice separates her from the coal-streaked London poor—though the Alley is running it as a thematic parallel to A Christmas Carol playing on the main stage. She’s a woman in grave pain, unable to move forward in life as memories replay in her mind.

In other words, it’s a holiday entertainment option for those years when things don't quite feel merry and bright. The Night Shift Before Christmas shows us that it’s OK, normal even, to want to knock Santa off his sleigh for being so smug in his jolliness. It’s a burger-and-fries-scented ode to the grumpy, the lonely, and the hurt. But it’s hopeful, too, teaching us that the true meaning of Christmas is what we individually decide to make of it.

“It's never too late to find redemption, and it's never too late to believe in yourself again,” Sanchez says. “It's never too late to go out for a night and laugh with a group of people and feel with a group of people and experience some community effervescence.”