Tag: A Christmas Carol

Day 12 / Reason 12: [This Page Left Intentionally Blank]

December 12, 2021

My favorite set designer Gary Smoot was a big fan of leaving gaps, open spaces in the art being offered, which allow the audience (or viewer or listener, whatever) to find a way inside of the creation on their own terms. Too much of anything leaves too little room to understand it.
I have had so much fun writing these mini-essays over the last twelve days. I have to confess I only had like six solid ideas before starting. I had to find the rest along the way, and if that’s not a powerful reminder of the thrills and terrors of developing new work, I really can’t imagine what is, nor do I have any desire to experience it.
At this moment, I’m feeling very much like I did just before retiring from theatre eight years ago. I’ve said everything I have to say for a while, and I can be happy going quiet again.
Now is the time for the play to have its say.
I look forward to hearing it.

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Tags: A Christmas Carol, A Contemporary Theatre, Paul Mullin
Day 10 / Reason 10: I May Hate It

December 10, 2021

Lest you think I had these twelve blog posts neatly planned out before I started posting this virtual half-Advent calendar of reasons for going back to the theatre after an 8-year absence, please know that the idea for this one came to me in the bathtub two nights ago, when I suddenly asked out loud, “What if I hate it?” I smiled and a familiar sense of delight came upon me, because I knew that there’s a less than trivial chance I might.
I would say that over the decades I attended shows at Seattle’s big houses before retiring, I was wowed by maybe ten percent of the offerings, then moderately impressed with another thirty, disappointed by twenty percent, and then flat out hated roughly the remaining thirty.
Hell, as much I as I heaped praise on Amy Thone two posts ago, it’s also undeniable that she has appeared in shows which I have absolutely loathed. Back in 2010 I took my friend, the journalist Tom Paulson, to see the Seattle Rep’s production of God of Carnage, featuring Amy and her husband Hans Altwies. Tom seemed genuinely confused and shaken by both how bad it was, and conversely, how much the audience seemed to love it. At one point he turned to me and whispered, “Why are all these people laughing?” Before I could even think of something clever to answer, I blurted out the truth: “Stockholm Syndrome.”
Hating bad theatre is a big part of being a playwright. Hell, it’s a big part of being a theatre lover. Because anyone who really loves the artform understands that sitting through a bad play is infinitely more excruciating than sitting through a bad movie or television show. In the theatre, you’re trapped, and what’s worse, you’re trapped with other people (Sartre’s definition of Hell). The fact that live group suffering is multiplicative explains in large part why the stakes of live theatre are always so high, even when the mere facts would argue that they are invariably quite low.
So maybe you can help me out here. Why is the fact that there’s a better than negligible chance I might hate A Contemporary Theatre‘s production of A Christmas Carol such a compelling reason for me wanting to go? Am I a masochist? Or is it that I know, deep down, that if we are capable of throwing gobs of money, love, and attention at a production, and it still turns out to be horrible, then maybe we are right on track back to normal after all?

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Tags: A Christmas Carol, A Contemporary Theatre, Paul Mullin
Day 9 / Reason 9: I Figured Out How Christmas Carols Work

December 9, 2021

Maybe Charles Dickens was merely being twee when he called his novella “A Christmas Carol“, but let’s at least consider another possibility: he knew exactly what he was doing, and by titling the story as he did, he helped guarantee it would become a perennial holiday classic.
What is a Christmas carol anyway? It’s a song, which we know well, because we have sung it our entire lives, but with just one small wrinkle, a constraint on the magic: we can only sing it during a special time of the year. Outside of that time, the song no longer holds the same power, or really any power at all.
I can imagine Dickens’ wanting to employ similar magic for his story. By calling it “a Christmas Carol” he understood that he was narrowing the space on the calendar during which the story would be enjoyed, while deepening and widening its reach beyond any of his other classic tales. (I actually have no idea, really, what Dickens was thinking. I suppose I could Google it, but why ruin the fun of speculating?)
We have a terrible misapprehension of how art works in our current culture. We read a book, Moby Dick, say, and then we think we’re done. “All good. Moby Dick = finished.” We look at a single Jackson Pollack painting, maybe not even in real life, maybe on a computer screen. And we say to ourselves: “Good. ‘Action painting’ = big squiggly mess of colors. Got it! Moving on.” But that’s not how art works. Most art works through the mystical mechanisms of return. You have to keep revisiting, renewing, because each time you do, you create the opportunity for something new to happen. That’s the reward for your faithfulness.
A full engagement with art requires tapping into the dimensions of the sacred ritual and the mystical, even if you—like me—don’t, strictly speaking, believe in such dimensions. (Surely if you are reading this obscure blog about theatre, you have at least a passing familiarity with the notion of a willing suspension of disbelief. Theatre runs on this not-so-secret sauce.)
Whenever I talk about the ineffable effects of art, I always come back to the Hopi. The famous religious historian Elaine Pagels tells a story about a particular sect of that tribe who go through an elaborate ceremony every morning to make the sun rise. When asked what would happen if they simply neglected to perform the rite one day, they reply: “Oh sure, let’s plunge the world into eternal darkness for the sake of your stupid experiment.”
Winter solstices have been coming and going for billions of years before human beings strolled the globe. We don’t make the light bounce back out of the darkness by celebrating Christmas.
On the other hand, why risk it?

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Tags: A Christmas Carol, A Contemporary Theatre, Paul Mullin
Day 8 / Reason 8: Amy Thone

December 8, 2021

“Actors I know and love.”
That is the last line of yesterday’s post. So it’s only fitting that we come now to Amy Thone, who represents, for me, the epitome of that phrase.
But first, I need to stop and explain how I am mucking up the flow of this series of blogs, and mangling the architecture of its suspense. If I were being clever in how I promoted and distributed these little essays, I would save the best for last, and wait until day 12 to reveal my decisive reason for returning to the theatre, saying something like, “Of course, the real reason I’m going back is… ____.” But I will spare you that trivial grift and tell you right here, right now, good and early, because I remember when I first heard about the possibility and I thought to myself, “Oh crap! If Amy plays Scrooge, I’m going to have break my theatre fast to go see her.”
Now, full disclosure: ACT’s production of A Christmas Carol features two Scrooges, playing in repertory, because the role is so demanding, and because ACT offers so many performances. (Hey, if you got a cash cow, milk it, right?) This year features the inestimable R. Hamilton Wright, a seasoned veteran in the part, alternating with Amy, a newcomer to the role. Says Ray Tagavilla, who’s playing Bob Cratchit, and is himself one of this city’s finest actors: “Bob Wright and Amy Thone as both Scrooges on different nights are 2 different shows.” Indeed, I am very tempted to go see Bob’s version, too.
A career in theatre, especially in a town like Seattle, can produce some interesting ironies and some fairly cruel petty twists of fate, because, as long as I have known Amy (since 1991) and as much as I admire her as an artist (profoundly and unequivocally), I have never had the opportunity to work with her as a playwright.
Ironically (I warned you there would be irony) the very first moment I met her was when Amy auditioned for a part in a play of mine at Annex Theatre. She blew the room away with her monologue, and then again, cold-reading sides from my script. We offered her the part right then and there, but she told us that she was Equity, i.e. a union actor, and could not work at Annex, a non-union shop. She explained that she was auditioning everywhere because she was new to town and wanted folks to be familiar with her work.
Talk about heartbreak. There’s nothing quite like the disappointment a playwright feels when he knows in his bones he has the perfect person for a role right in front of him, but he can’t cast her because of the arcane rules of theatre. (Reason #373 why I left.)
Amy and I became friends anyway, and have spent the intervening decades admiring each other’s work from across the unbridgeable gap of show biz circumstance in all its banality.
Amy Thone playing Scrooge has dragged me back to the theatre, because, beyond her being my friend, and despite my determination to stay away, Dame Thone, as I teasingly style her, is one of those performers who will surprise you every time she walks on stage. You’re prepared for it. You know it’s going to happen, but there she is, surprising you anyway.
I have seen at least twenty-five different actors perform Scrooge. I have even played him myself as a young man. But I know with a certainty that Amy is going to show me something about this timeless character that I have never known before. And in showing me something new about Scrooge, she will show me something new about myself. How often are we offered such a guarantee?

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Tags: A Christmas Carol, A Contemporary Theatre, Paul Mullin
Day 6 / Reason 6 for Going Back to the Theatre: John Langs

December 6, 2021

Yesterday I called out A Contemporary Theatre (ACT) as a reason for my going back to the theatre. What I didn’t include in that short essay is a disclosure of my profound bias, namely John Langs, who has been ACT’s Artistic Director for the last five years, and served on its creative staff since 2013. You should know that for even longer than that, John has been my artistic collaborator and very good friend.
I first met John when we were vetting candidates to direct my play Louis Slotin Sonata at Seattle’s now departed Empty Space Theatre back in 2006. He was living in Los Angeles but had directed some shows up here, including a very well received King Lear at Seattle Shakespeare Company. Before I even met with John, let alone hired him, I did my due diligence and asked around with theatre artists, mostly actors, who had worked with him. The praise they gave was effusive. To hear it from them, Langs was like some sort of directing savant always drawing the best out of every performer while making them want to do better. Their unadulterated adulation made me nervous. I get suspicious whenever I hear actors heap praise like this on a director. Stage directors have a tendency to build cults around themselves, with actors serving as acolytes. This arrangement can be deadly for a playwright trying to get a “clean” production of their play, unplagued by high concept and schmaltz . So I insisted on meeting the guy over beers. He seemed normal enough, offering questions and concerns about the script that were sharp and incisive without being arrogant or overbearing. And an additional fact helped weigh the scales in his favor: we didn’t have a lot of other options. Langs went on to give me the best production of the play it has ever had. And so when it was time to hire someone to direct the world premiere of my play The Sequence, his name was at the the top of my list. Since then John has served serious time with me in the trenches of new play development, and has became a treasured friend, remaining so long after I retired from the art form in which he continues to toil.
From what I hear, Langs is catching some flack for ultimately deciding to open ACT back up to live audiences with the theatre’s beloved annual cash cow A Christmas Carol. As I understand it, the argument goes something like this: “In this moment of radical artistic re-envisioning and reorientation, when the theatrical slate has been nearly wiped clean, why on earth would someone restage a dusty old play based on a dusty old book by a dusty old white guy about a dusty old white guy?”
I would love to avoid wading into the current quagmire of cultural revolution, while also pointing out that it was me calling for radically new work since the inception of this blog in 2010. So I’ll bite my tongue and offer the shortest riposte possible: theatre is an art form which feeds on repetition. And it is precisely those plays most familiar to us that can sustain the most radical re-thinkings and reimaginings, while still offering the “clean” essentials of their stories. Rob Weinert-Kendt, editor-in-chief of American Theatre explained this better than I ever could in a eulogy for the recently departed giant of American stage, Stephen Sondheim.

This, after all, is what a canon is, if we must have canons: not invariable paragons of perfection, necessarily, but works that somehow stay alive with surprise, with the shock of recognition, with argument. The musicals Stephen Sondheim wrote with a handful of deft collaborators remain among the most teemingly alive works anyone has ever composed for the stage, and it is hard to imagine a day when they won’t feel that way. As he put it in the second volume of lyric collection/memoir, Look, I Made a Hat, “The very thing that makes theatre impermanent is what makes it immortal. In a sense, every night of a show is a revival.”

Revival.
The word takes on a much deeper meaning in the context of the vast challenges Seattle Theatre now faces.
Langs understands that in order to get back to telling new stories with force, he has to let us have the old ones, with love. I don’t doubt for a second that John Langs’ future holds huge opportunities for him far beyond his work as the creative leader of downtown Seattle’s flagship theatre complex. He personifies that rare blend of cultivated charm, raw talent, and confident leadership that allows someone to excel in pretty much any career they choose: business, politics, the law. John chose the theatre— God help him— and the collective life of my plays has been bettered by that decision. The least I can do is go see this show he’s producing.

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Tags: A Christmas Carol, A Contemporary Theatre, Paul Mullin
Day 4 / Reason 4 for Going back to the Theatre: The Darkness

December 4, 2021

When I was a kid and saw various versions of A Christmas Carol on the TV featuring scenes of old-timey Christmastime London (51.51° N), like the street outside Scrooge and Marley’s or Bob Cratchit at his standing desk, I remember marveling at how dark it was even in the afternoon. (And I knew it was afternoon because Scrooge kept saying, “Good afternoon!”) I grew up in Maryland (39.29° N), and it certainly gets cold there in the wintertime (and godawful miserably humid hot in the summer), but it wasn’t until I lived through a winter in the Pacific Northwest (47.61° N) that I understood fully about this kind of darkness. Come December, the edges of the night here squeeze in on both sides and gloom takes over. (As I write this at 8:15 AM it is dark and raining, and it will rain on through the dark day without cease. There will not come an hour I won’t need to turn a light on to read.) Here’s how I describe it in my novel Seattle Trust:

Seattle slowly circles December’s drain. Days will now march past like lumbering ghosts, as the border between day and night softens like bruising fruit into a barely varying sameness. Gray in/gray out.

I count on the Christmas season to boost me through until the Solstice, when the days start getting longer again. Usually, by the middle to end of January, I start feeling the light gently seeping back. But until then, the “artificial light” of art in all its forms: Christmas trees, and music, and plays, has to do the heavy lifting of my soul.
So yeah, one reason (reason number four, to be exact) that I’m going back to the theatre, is because…
“I need a little Christmas. Right this very minute.”

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Tags: A Christmas Carol, A Contemporary Theatre, Paul Mullin
Day 3 / Reason 3 for Going Back to the Theatre: A Christmas Carol as Stage Play

December 3, 2021

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.

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Tags: A Christmas Carol, A Contemporary Theatre, Paul Mullin
Day 2 / Reason 2 for Going Back to the Theatre: My Sister

December 2, 2021
Against all better judgement I have begun a 12-part blog series enumerating my reasons for going back to the theatre, specifically to see ACT’s production of A Christmas Carol on December 12. This is day two of my virtual half-advent calendar.
I have never really fully explained why I left the theatre back in 2013. My reasons were personal, even if my retirement was painfully public. Maybe I’ll get to sharing those reasons someday, but before I can do that, I should state for the record who is to blame for me becoming involved in the art form in the first place. That would by my sister, Margaret, or “Maggie” as those of us closest to her know her these days.
Maggie first fully electrified my theatrical imagination playing Puck in her junior high school’s production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. I was maybe six or seven, but I followed the Elizabethan text better than one might expect. Still, a lot of the language lofted over my head. Except when Maggie spoke, transformed as she was into a mischievous hobgoblin, seemingly in charge of all of the chaos reigning on the stage.

Captain of our fairy band,
Helena is here at hand,
And the youth, mistook by me,
Pleading for a lover’s fee.
Shall we their fond pageant see?
Lord, what fools these mortals be!

I already had it mostly memorized, because I had listened to her memorizing it in her room over the weeks before.
The following year, when my sister played Gollum in the school’s production of The Hobbit, the gas really hit the spark plug.
“Bless us and splesh us my precious. Gol-LUM!”
She would practice her lines over and over in her room with the door shut, but she was loud enough for me to hear everything in the room Eddie and I shared next door.
“What’s it got in its pockets, my precious? Gol-LUM!”
These eponymous punctuations “Gol-LUM!” burst forth from her as seemingly uncontrollable, autonomic eructations welling up from the pit of her gut. Or rather, Gollum’s gut, for she had, indeed, become the twisted little monster.
“We wants it, we needs it. Must have the precious. They stole it from us. Sneaky little hobbitses. Wicked, tricksy, false!”
Looking back now, she was so unlike other girls her age, in the mid-70s: so obsessed with hair and fashion and looks. Oh, Maggie cared about those things too, obsessed about them at times, but she threw them all aside when she came to inhabit Gollum. Once him, she didn’t care one bit about looking feminine, even though the director had squeezed her blossoming body into a green and brown painted body suit. She gave herself over completely to the character. It was really, for me, the first time I had ever witnessed such a transformation.
Now you may say, wait a minute. She was doing theatre, pretending. This wasn’t real. But when your oldest sister by six years is becoming an avariciously murderous monster in the room next door to yours, it’s real all right.
Keep in mind this is decades before the magic of Peter Jackson’s digital capture of Andy Cirkus’ pliable, gamut-running, psychologically insightful portrayal in the Lord of the Rings Trilogy. It was even prior to the animated version of The Hobbit released in 1977. As far as I know my sister had never seen a performance of Gollum, and I’m not even sure she read the book. My sister had nothing from which to construct her portrayal but the text of the stage adaption and her own imagination. In other words, she did the quintessential actor’s job, and took fresh text (fresh to her anyways) and molded from it a character whom she then inhabited. Her portrayal of Gollum encapsulated everything about the theatrical process that would get and keep me stoked for the next three decades. As an artist, my sister set me on fire. With Puck and Gollum she showed me how weirdness and audacity could be leveraged into a gift you could offer other people in performance.
The key to my origin story as a theatre artist—which I never put together consciously throughout all those decades of doing it, and only just fully realized writing this—is that I started acting, and then went on to playwriting, because of my sister Maggie. She touched the match to my fuse as an artist, and I’ve been burning ever since.
Every one of my siblings has some experience with the theatre, but I was the only one who went professional. I got my Actors’ Equity card at the age of 19 playing Young Scrooge at Ford’s Theatre in Washington, DC. I never used my union card again.
My Christmas present from Maggie that year was a beautiful, hardbound illustrated copy of A Christmas Carol. Here’s how she inscribed it.

1/11/88

Dear Paul,

I saw this book a week or so after we saw your show & I had to get it for you. I know that the show caused some inner turbulence for you but it is a timeless story that touches everyone’s heart. Your show was an excellent adaptation of the story. After buying this book I started thinking about what it is that makes this story so special. What did I come up with? We can identify with Scrooge’s past, present and future “personas”, and we can relate to the loss of Christmas spirit that seems to occur as we get older. We become so caught up in the ways of the world, that we lose touch with the ways of the soul. I’d like to believe that in this story Dickens isn’t merely encouraging the celebration of Christmas, he’s demanding that we celebrate life. The ghosts are merely showing us how we have allowed the control of our lives to be taken out of our hands. To you, dear brother, I wis a full, rewarding, happy, sad, thoughtful, action-packed, glorious and challenging life. I hope that you will enjoy this book & celebrate Christmas every day of your life.

Lots of Love,

MCM [Margaret Cecilia Mullin]

There’s so much I could tell you about everything my sister has taught me over the years, but if I had to boil it all down to highlights it would be these:
- Life is long, but ultimately short.
- Be weird when you want.
- Be loud in your love.
- Celebrate light in the darkness.
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Tags: A Christmas Carol, A Contemporary Theatre, Paul Mullin
Twelve Days of A CHRISTMAS CAROL

December 1, 2021

In twelve days, I will go to a theater to watch a play for the first time in eight years.
In twelve days, I will go to Northgate Station with my two teenage sons, my wife, and her mother. We will climb aboard the Link light rail and ride to downtown Seattle to see A Contemporary Theatre’s perennial holiday cash-cow stage adaptation of Charles Dicken’s classic novella, A Christmas Carol. If this were three years ago, and you knew anything about my history with the theatre as an artform, this news would be, at least to some degree, surprising, maybe even shocking. This is because eight years ago I made a big public stink about retiring from the artform for good.
So why am I going back now? Well, I have a hodgepodge of reasons, all sort of related, but they also stand on their own. So I thought I’d present them over the next twelve days, like a half advent calendar, leading up to the day we Mullins go to the show.
Dec. 1 / Reason 1 – A Christmas Carol: The Book
I have always loved A Christmas Carol, going back to my first exposure to it, a radio play version put on by the various deejays, announcers, and on-air reporters at WBAL in Baltimore, which was the city’s flagship adult contemporary radio station in the 70s. There’s nothing really like it one the air anymore, certainly not in Seattle. WBAL played a wide spectrum of pop music from the 40s forward to contemporary, but the station also ran news, sports, and hour-long interview programs featuring local figures: politicians, sure, but also local sports and entertainment luminaries. It played in the background at my house from the time my parents got up and had their first cup of coffee until they went to bed after their last cup of coffee. (I still don’t understand how Mom and Dad could drink black coffee just before sleeping.)
I first read A Christmas Carol when I was maybe 12. It was a hard slog for me then, but I got through it, and enjoyed it, and it spooked me in all the right places. The novella is an astoundingly concise clockwork of a plot, moving the reader along relentlessly to its formalized conclusion. The language is rich: simultaneously lugubrious and cocksure.

Old Marley was dead, to begin with. There is no doubt whatever about that.

Was there ever an opening argument of a case stated more plainly than that? But Dickens then goes on to expand and expound, like Bach working up a fugal theme:

Old Marley was dead as a door nail.

Mind! I don’t mean to say that I know of my own knowledge, what there is particularly dead about a door-nail. I might have been inclined, myself, to regard a coffin-nail as the deadest piece of ironmongery. But the wisdom of our ancestors is in the simile; and my unhallowed hands shall not disturb it, or the country’s done for. You will, therefore, permit me to repeat, emphatically, that Marley was as dead as a door-nail.

Gah! I loved it as a kid, even barely understanding it as I did. And even back then I recognized how deeply and overtly political the story was.

Are there no prisons? Are there no workhouses?

Can’t we just round up these people living in tents and RVs and put them somewhere we don’t have to look at them every day?

I don’t think it’s some warm and fuzzy “Spirt of Christmas” that keeps us coming back to this book. I think it’s the author’s very sharp and very necessary spirit of radical progressive humanism.
Dickens thought we could do better.
And we still need to.

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Tags: A Christmas Carol, A Contemporary Theatre, Paul Mullin