In a phone interview earlier this year, literary comic David Sedaris told me one of the biggest career mistakes he’d made was allowing a stage adaptation to be made from his now-classic public radio piece “The SantaLand Diaries” in the mid-1990s.

The problem: By giving the text over to an actor for performance, Sedaris’ drolly low-key, unemotive reading style — a key ingredient to the author’s humor — is tossed out the window along with any trace of subtlety.
Director Jim Linde had no idea of Sedaris’ disdain when he set about to bring “SantaLand,” Sedaris’ hilarious tale of working as an elf at Macy’s, to Scottsdale’s Tinsel Town Tavern this holiday season through plucky upstart company Artists’ Theatre Project. And that’s a good thing.

Weaving together three disparate Sedaris stories — “SantaLand,” “Season’s Greetings to Our Friends and Family!!!” and “Front Row Center with Thaddeus Bristol,” all from the essay collection “Holidays on Ice” — into a pastiche of solo narratives, Linde has created something wholly fresh and interesting.

The staged production still doesn’t solve the problem of losing Sedaris’ voice. His text is generously peppered with punch lines that get lost or swallowed up on stage. But Scott Campbell, the actor who narrates “SantaLand” in an elf costume so garish it belongs in “A Christmas Story,” delivers a great performance nevertheless, as does Stacie Lambeth, performing “Season’s Greetings” as a disturbingly peppy mother writing a holiday family letter that grows increasingly crazed and morbidly funny.

The third story, “Front Row Center,” is hilarious as a written essay, less so on stage. The premise — a caustic critic laying into children’s Christmas productions — is solid, but the kind of sarcasm and irony in which the essay traffics are difficult animals to tame on stage. Neil Cohen, a theater critic for Echo magazine acting as the essay’s narrator, simply isn’t up to task. (However his character, in the end, does become a Puck-like commentator on the evening’s show in a way director Linde probably didn’t realize. It’s still a neat twist.)

In all, the show is probably geared best toward pre-existing Sedaris fans, those already familiar with “SantaLand.” The rest would be better off digging into the NPR archive (ww.npr.org) and listening to the author himself tell his tale.

That’s probably what Sedaris would prefer, too.