Yesterday I mentioned that I got my Equity Card at 19 playing Young Scrooge in an adaptation of A Christmas Carol at Ford’s Theatre in Washington D. C. If the name of that venue sounds familiar, it should: it’s where Lincoln got shot. (I used to nap between matinees and evening performances in the box beneath the one in which he was sitting that fateful night. By long-standing tradition the Presidential Box is never occupied, and is decorated in the same fashion as it was the night Lincoln was assassinated: red, white and blue bunting with a portrait of George Washington.)
In the copy of A Christmas Carol my sister Maggie gave me just after that production, she said, “I know that the show caused some inner turbulence for you but it is a timeless story that touches everyone’s heart.” It’s been so long since then that I can’t be completely sure which turbulence she’s referring to. There was a lot going on for me at that time. But what leaps out to me even after all these years is that the actor who played “Old Scrooge” hated my guts.
I don’t remember his name, and if I did, I wouldn’t mention it now. Saying an actor’s name publicly, whether in praise or condemnation, is like offering blood to a vampire. He was British, a bit of a washout over there from what I gathered, and a dedicated drunk over here, but he looked and sounded the part and the crowds loved him. I wasn’t the only actor he hated. He managed to alienate all of the young men in the ensemble, such that by the time we were in actual performance, we used to hiss and moan at him as ghosts at Scrooge’s window, just loud enough, we hoped, for him but not the audience to catch the words: “Scroooooge! You’re my BITCH, Scrooooge! Ima fuck you UP, Scroooooge!”
“Old Scrooge” never quite forgave us for that, while never fully acknowledging our idiocy either. Somehow he found out that I was aspiring playwright and relished mocking me for it. After one performance—on Christmas Eve, no less—he pulled me aside and scolded me for blowing my blocking. Apparently, I had spun clockwise instead of counter in the dream sequence, and it had throw him off terribly, or so he claimed. He pulled me onto the stage after the house had cleared to the very spot of my transgression and lectured me in his posh flutey British: “Now look here, Paul. It’s important to get these things right. This isn’t David Mamet or Arthur Miller. This is a British play and precision means something.”
Oh the things I wanted to say. Things like, “Now look here, fuckwit! It’s not a British play, it’s a British book. This stage adaptation is American. (In point of fact, it was newly crafted that year, by the show’s director, and the Ford’s artistic director, David Bell.) So fuck off, you boozy limey bastard, and if you think Miller and Mamet don’t require precision, then I won’t bother wondering why you can’t get work on either side of the pond, besides playing a washed up bitter British wanker, such as yourself.”
Of course, I said nothing of the sort. Instead, I nodded mutely, and walked away with my face burning. I might have been nineteen but I already had some idea of how the world worked. If I had thrown down on this asshole like he deserved, it would be me shit-canned and blackballed, not him.
Fact is A Christmas Carol is almost perfectly suited for adaptation into a stage play. The book is divided into five sections, or “staves” as Dickens calls them (since he wants you think of it as a piece of holiday music. Get it?). These five sections match Shakespeare’s five-act structure quite nicely. The story’s action takes place in one night and keeps returning to Scrooge’s apartments, thus satisfying, with a bit of mystical fudgery and flashbackery, the unities of time and place called for in Aristotle’s Poetics. Combine that with characters as crisp as fresh Saltines, and in modern show biz terms, you have a cash-cow you can present on one set, while double and treble-casting the character assignments, and still keep almost all of of the story without losing any of its sense. One could almost accuse Dickens of having the stage in mind when he wrote it, just like Steinbeck did for Of Mice and Men. Heck, the first stage production was mounted just weeks after the publication of the novella by C. Z. Barnett, at the Surrey Theatre in February of1844.
So yes, it’s a British book (thanks for stating the obvious, my boozy “Old Scrooge”) but it also makes a dandy American play.
