“He’s an angry elf.”

The line comes from another holiday favorite, “Elf,” starring Will Ferrell.

Nevermind that in the 2003 classic, the “angry elf” line gets aimed at an arrogant children’s author (played by the great Peter Dinklage, plenty angry but also not really an elf). “Angry elf” might also apply to Crumpet, the crusty Macy’s character made famous by humorist David Sedaris after his stint as one of Santa’s helpers in Macy’s Santaland. Or maybe it was Crumpet that made Sedaris famous.

Sedaris first read “The Santaland Diaries” on National Public Radio way back in 1992, and airing that reading has become a tradition on NPR.

In the one-man play adapted by Joe Mantello, the man who becomes Crumpet needs money, badly, so he takes a job at Macy’s, where a gaudy green costume, unruly crowds, dyspeptic shoppers, the random celebrity, spoiled kids, immature parents, a flirty elf, crass consumerism, commercialization and an odd assortment of Santas all conspire to challenge Crumpet’s faith in humanity.

And when Crumpet says he thinks he’s starting to lose it during Volcanic Theatre Pub’s new production of the play, opening Saturday, you’re inclined to believe him. Always fascinating actor Derek Sitter stars as Crumpet, giving his own twist on what has quickly become a go-to holiday production at theaters around the country.

VTP is essentially a one-man show. Sitter is owner, manager, bartender and fix-it-man. As busy as he is, he was upbeat before a Friday evening rehearsal a couple of weeks ago.

“This show’s gonna be so much fun,” he said.

This is not Bend’s first go-round with “The Santaland Diaries,” nor is it Sitter’s. He did a reading of it shortly after he arrived in Bend a few years ago at the request of folks at the now-defunct Innovation Theatre Works, he said. ITW staged a full production of “Santaland” in 2011 before the theater closed in fall 2012. ITW resurrected the show last Christmas just long enough for a short run at 2nd Street Theater.

Now that he owns his own venue, Sitter is taking full advantage. He’s always pictured doing “Santaland” as a “TED talk from the psycho ward,” he said. Sitter has also put together a companion slideshow on the west Bend theater’s 16-foot screen that “will honor Sedaris’ original story and its dark humor and relevance to the commercialization of Christmas,” he said.

The more than 100 slides are timed to accompany the material and allow for further mining of humor. Not that Sedaris’s already funny material necessarily needs it.

Along with cute slides of little kids, a few stills of memorable scenes from movies such as “Elf” and “Bad Santa,” some of the images he’s selected might surprise viewers. When Crumpet mentions a Santaland patron with a visible dent in the side of his skull, Sitter located a photo of an injured scalp that will provide enough visual aid to make you squirm.

“I’m going to do it my way, the way I had always envisioned it. And I always envisioned it as a reading — because that’s the way (it airs) every year on NPR,” Sitter said.

“He and his sister (Amy Sedaris) have written a couple of plays, but his essays are not to be performed. You saw the letter,” Sitter said.

“The letter” Sitter refers to is one a former classmate of his received after writing Sedaris in 1999 requesting his permission to adapt Sedaris’s book “Naked” to the stage. Sitter shared with GO! a photo of the response letter Sedaris sent his friend.

It reads in part, “I’m reluctant to have any of my stories adopted (sic) for the stage. I gave permission once before and have regretted it ever since. To me, they’re just stories meant to live on a page or to be read out loud.”

Said Sitter, “That letter — I’m like, ‘Yes! That’s exactly what I’ve been saying. Now I have David Sedaris’s confirmation! Yes!’”

Though mindful of the way the play began its life — as “an essay to be read on the radio,” he said — Sitter has faith in Mantello’s adaptation.

“The play is not perfect, but it does have the character arc. Meaning the character does go through a change. He does grow,” said Sitter, who further believes theater should “always have a sense of danger, and the basis of storytelling is conflict, period,” he said.

If Sedaris’s Crumpet were all ruddy-cheeked good cheer rather than humiliated by his circumstances, dress and treatment, there’s no way he’d be the trenchant observer of the human condition at play in a department store Santa exhibit.

Some people in Bend are too busy contorting into paddle-board yoga poses, or founding world-saving nonprofits, or achieving other feats only the creme-de-la-creme among the self-actualized are capable, but trust me — it’s the cynical, the curmudgeonly and the dyspeptic who are probably paying the most attention to things going on around them. They’re just not all as funny as Sedaris.

For Crumpet, “It’s his own personal obstacles and conflict of existing in this Santaland, with all these other people, (who) are also all obstacles … keeping him (from) being happy. Being a very sensitive human being and artist, he’s experiencing some very ugly behavior.”

The humor is already present in Sedaris’s material, so an actor need not ham it up as the elf, or gloss over the play’s darker subject matters, said Sitter, who brings his usual intensity to the role.

“It is Derek Sitter’s interpretation of ‘Santaland Diaries,’ like I do with all material.” he said. “This is my version of David.”

— Reporter: 541-383-0349, djasper@bendbulletin.com