A CHRISTMAS CAROL - Milwaukee Repertory Theater

(A CHRISTMAS CAROL . . . continued)
Because so many of us come to the story via a
“treatment” rather than the novella itself, it’s a
surprise how many who love the story don’t really
know it. In the stage adaptation that I initially
crafted with Ed Morgan in 1998, our goal was to
create a version that was as theatrical, visually
spectacular, musically joyous and ultimately
uplifting as we could possibly make it – without
shortchanging the depth of Dickens’ insight into
the lonely, bitter soul who lives at the story’s center.
Those opening lines, of course, are key to the whole
thing. Dickens drives away at the fact of Marley’s
death as if somehow there were doubts – as if
at any moment the old reprobate’s corpse might
suddenly resurrect. (Spoiler alert – it does.) A
CHRISTMAS CAROL is a story of the spiritual rebirth
of one whose soul has died, so, poetically, it must
MILWAUKEE REPERTORY THEATER • Winter 2010 • 11
Other Rep Resident Acting Company Members in this year’s
production of A CHRISTMAS CAROL include Deborah Staples,
Jonathan Gillard Daly, Laura Gordon and Peter Silbert.
begin with the finality of death. Ultimately the trigger that allows Scrooge to find joy in life and
become “as good a friend and as good a man as the city of London knew” is when a gothic reaper
in the shape of the Ghost of Christmas Future forces him to glimpse under the blanket that covers
his own corpse and recognize the waste of spending so many of his precious years in his “money
changing hole.”
As much as A CHRISTMAS CAROL is about spiritual renewal and reconnecting with family, it’s also
about money and poverty. “If they would rather die,” Scrooge rants, speaking of the starving poor,
“they had better do it, and decrease the surplus population.” The words sting as sharply today as
they did in 1843. If Dickens left us an image of all of the goodness that Christmas can engender, he
also left us with a nightmare vision of inner-city poverty that lives in our own city as inhumanely as
it did his. And yet, our appreciation of Dickens and the endurance of A CHRISTMAS CAROL come more
from a novelist’s ability to penetrate an individual human soul, than from his ability to articulate
a political manifesto. George Orwell, a passionate socialist who was to write his own apocalyptic
vision of the future in 1984, pointed out in an essay on Dickens that “He has no plan to change
society; his target is ‘human nature,’” and that Dickens’ only real lesson is “that capitalists ought to
be kind, not that workers ought to be rebellious.” Orwell dubs Dickens’ outrage “a generous anger.”
Ultimately in this simple story, Dickens asks a profoundly simple thing: that at this “festive time of
the year,” those of us who have been blessed with privileges and good fortune should take the time
to be truly grateful – and to act in ways, both big and small, in which we can be kind and generous
to our “fellow-passengers to the grave.” That, he posits, is what it truly means to “know how to keep
Christmas well.”
Joseph Hanreddy, Director
Former Rep Artistic Director 1993 - 2010/Director of Fellowship in Directing and Design at UWM’s
Peck School of the Arts