WEST STOCKBRIDGE — Have you ever sat in an audience, not enjoying yourself, wishing you could express your displeasure to the actors onstage?

Jack Grossman and Zoe Wohlfeld have an answer.

“One hundred or 200 years ago, people brought in rotten fruit to throw when they didn’t like a show,” Grossman said in an interview with The Eagle. “I wanted to bring that back.”

He and Wohlfeld not only encourage that kind of behavior, but actually supply audiences with banana peels at “A Night of Drama (Does A Christmas Carol),” their comedy show riffing on Charles Dickens’ holiday classic, 7 p.m. Dec. 15, at The Foundry.

“We’ve performed in places where there were carpets, and that’s not good,” Grossman said. “We offer napkins now to the audience.”

But what exactly is the show itself?

Grossman and Wohlfeld, a couple who call themselves Jack and Zoe Comedy, describe it as a sort-of-improv show, in which Grossman stands on stage as the director, giving a group of actors prompts for melodramatic scenes to play out, which come from a variety of sources.

“From, like, 18th-century France or Charles Dickens kind of stuff,” Grossman said. “But it’s always up to me in the moment where the show’s going to go. I have the scenes in the back of my head but sometimes things aren’t working the way we intend them to.”

At The Foundry, he’ll be pulling from Dickens’ “A Christmas Carol.”

Wohlfeld, who performs in the show alongside a rotating cast of around six other performers, is intimated by the idea of performing traditional improv.

“But here, if I am not doing well, Jack will help me,” she said. “If you’re not getting laughter, you know pretty quickly what the audience is feeling about you, and Jack will acknowledge I’m not doing well. Which gets the audience on our side.”

Grossman added, “We want to get just close enough that people think it could be, and that makes it even funnier that it’s … what we’re doing.”

The duo met as students at École Philippe Gaulier, a clown school in France — where they studied, among other subjects, melodrama.

“It’s like rolling your Rs and walking in semicircles and stylistically dramatic things that are so stupid when you think about them,” Wohlfeld said, laughing. “You have to try and have dignity and take yourself very seriously, try to be the most beautiful actor in the whole world and that inherently makes what you’re doing really funny. We’re always striving to do as well as we can.”

They first staged “A Night of Drama” at the 2023 Edinburgh Fringe Festival, where it was a surprise hit, leading to multiple extensions and an invitation for an encore run in the 2024 Edinburgh Fringe Festival. Now, they split their time between Manhattan and London, where they do “A Night of Drama” once a month in spaces like bookshops and pubs.

“We also run a clown open mic thing while we’re in London, and a little workshop where we get guest teachers to teach new clowns,” he said.

But recently, Wohlfeld became interested in bringing the show closer to home.

“I’m originally from Chatham, N.Y.,” she said. Her mom now lives in nearby Spencertown.

“Literally like 10 minutes away from The Foundry.”

Wohlfeld saw a clown show there a couple of years ago, which made her think, “What if we brought ‘A Night of Drama’ there?”

They now have a large roster of performers to use in the show, made up of not only friends from schools, but friends of friends, and friends of friends of friends.

“At this point, the harder part is we can’t have everyone on who wants to be on, or who we want on. We have to be kind of selective now,” Grossman said. “It’s weird to say ‘no’ to people.”

Though both would call themselves clowns, they’re reticent to use that word when advertising the show — especially in America, where they think it might conjure an image of children’s birthday parties.

“And birthday clowns are clowns, too, of course,” Grossman said. But clowning, ultimately, is about responding in the moment.

“And my ‘live directing’ is a way to bring clown into it, to be able to respond to the audience,” he said.

“And clown is all about mistakes. It’s all about failure,” she said. “I think there’s something really beautiful about that. We have to do a lot of really bad shows in order to get to a good show.”

Every time they stage “A Night of Drama,” then, it gets a little bit sharper, so that it can be a little bit, well, worse.

“‘A Night of Drama’ still has so far to go,” Wohlfeld said. “There’s so much potential to make it bigger and better than it is now.”