Office holiday parties can be dreadful or a lot of fun. They often provide good stories.

In my case, a company I worked for inadvertently planned the holiday party at a porn club in New York City. In the case of Office Christmas Party: Grinch in Fight with Rudolph, Police Called, now playing at The Purple Rose Theatre, the two Christmas characters in the melee were thought to be arguing over how to sing a Christmas song. Seriously.

Playwright and Director of the play Jeff Daniels says he was inspired to write the comedy after reading the headline, the play’s title, in mlive.com, the website that curates content from local town news sites around much of Michigan. Daniels did not probe the real story behind the headline, but made up the story himself.

Wally Wilkins Jr. (Ryan Carlson) owns a fudge factory Up North and is playing Santa at the company’s Christmas party. Jerry Cornicelli (Paul Stroili) and Lamar Johnson (Henri Franklin) are the workers dressed as Grinch and Rudolph. Jerry is a nervous nellie prone to stress blindness, while Lamar has a bible-thumping wife who strikes fear in his heart. While the two-co-workers were not actually in a fist-fight, the story has gone viral that they have and a “fight club” is offering a big purse if they actually fight via a streaming event.

Bernice Wilkins, Wally’s daughter (Juji Berry), is next in line to inherit the financially struggling fudge firm. Ruth Crawford plays Secretary Madge Milbury, and dons different wigs and a backwards baseball cap to play every other employee in the fudge company, as well as news reporter “Babette.” Crawford is a delight, and her appearances changing characters reminds me of sketches from old variety shows like The Carol Burnett Show and Sid Caesar’s Show of Shows.

This is broad comedy. Daniels has been doing a lot of interviews, including with EncoreMichigan, talking about how comedies are going to be the bread-and-butter of what Purple Rose brings to patrons as it continues to try and recover audiences since the pandemic ended.

The story starts out strong, with Ryan Carlson doing a superb job of portraying the over-stressed small-business owner, referencing how his father and grandfather both died on the same spot in the office he now occupies as he grills Cornicelli and Johnson about what they were thinking getting into an argument over how to sing a song.

The set design by Bartley H. Bauer is simple, but effective, mostly serving as Wally’s office. And there is a large multi-media screen upstage that appears to be a huge painting of Wally’s grandfather, which comes to life at times talking to the grandson. It’s a neat feature to the storytelling.

There is a wee bit of darkness in the comedy, but it is certainly accessible for families with kids over the age of 12. The play runs less than 90 minutes, but at times it feels like Daniels wasn’t sure about “what comes next?” Jokes are revisited. The story lags in places. And there is a little bit of calendar stress watching a Christmas story when it seems like we just started seeing the pumpkin spice latte signs and we’re still three weeks shy of Halloween. But the play is briskly selling advanced tickets with more than 11,000 sold.

Overall, it’s an amusing slice of Michigan small-town life where police are called to check on casualties at an office Christmas party. Office Christmas Party: Grinch in Fight with Rudolph, Police Called plays through December 21.