Pasadena’s A Noise Within (ANW) theater is currently staging British author Charles Dickens’ 1843 novella A Christmas Carol, a holiday tradition for the company. The production, co-directed by Julia Rodriguez-Elliott and Geoff Elliott, runs through December 24th.
Geoff Elliott’s adaptation takes its lines exclusively from the novella. There are also original musical numbers composed by Robert Oriol and conducted by Rod Bagheri. A narrator (Mildred Marie Langford) reads snippets of A Christmas Carol to connect the scenes.
There are a few spoilers in this review, but the plot is familiar even if its historical context may not be.
The play begins on a Christmas Eve in London with the misanthropic Ebenezer Scrooge (Frederick Stuart, played alternately by Geoff Elliott) going over the accounts for the loan and investment firm known as Scrooge and Marley.
Marley, dead seven years, was Scrooge’s business partner. Too cheap to redo the firm’s “Scrooge and Marley” signage, Scrooge answers to either name.
Scrooge’s nephew Fred (Mitch Connelly, who also plays Young Scrooge) drops by to wish his uncle a merry Christmas. Scrooge rebuffs Fred with a bitter “Bah! Humbug!” After begrudgingly granting his employee Mr. Cratchit (Kasey Mahaffy) Christmas day off, Scrooge heads home.
There, when Scrooge sits down to eat his gruel, Marley’s ghost (Riley Shanahan) enters, clanging the iron chains weighing him down. Marley’s ghost tells Scrooge that the chains are those Marley forged in life and that Scrooge is forging such for himself.
Let’s consider these chains.
Patrons entering the ANW theater will find chains hanging from the low ceiling behind the back row seats. Go ahead, let your head brush against them.
The chains are both literal and metaphorical.
Dickens wrote as coal-powered industrialization was going full steam (pun intended) in 1843 England. On the ANW stage, the opening backdrop image is of London’s St. Paul’s Cathedral behind which clouds boil, ambiguously storm clouds, billowing steam or perhaps thick coal smog.
Coal mining, steam engines, and steam-powered bellows allowed for the mass production of iron products, such as chains, railways and girders. The ANW set has girders framing the stage, evoking the story’s context of fossil-fueled industrialization. On the girder crossing above the stage a Christmas wreath hangs.
Karl Marx studied Dickens’ England to write Das Kapital. With the mass proletarianization of propertyless and so voteless citizens, the 1830s and 1840s saw the rise of Chartism, a working-class movement demanding the vote for all male citizens (regardless of property ownership), among other political reforms that might goad Parliament to enact laws ameliorative of industrial capitalism’s hardships.
Yes, the demand was for universal male suffrage in Britain (which arrived in 1918; universal female suffrage arrived a decade later in 1928).
I will get to how the women in A Christmas Carol deal with Scrooge.
There were both “Moral Force” and “Physical Force” Chartists, putting the fear of God into the elites of a British society oppressive of the poor. In 1839 the Victorian sage Thomas Carlyle published his book Chartism, which poses the sarcastic question, “Are there not tread-mills, gibbets; even hospitals, poor-rates, New Poor-Law?”
As scholars note, Scrooge in Dickens’ novella echoes Carlyle’s question with a straight face: “And the Union workhouses? … Are they still in operation? … The Treadmill and the Poor Law are in full vigour, then?”
Prisoners walked hard-labor treadmills to power machinery. The Poor Law mandated workhouses for the destitute featuring conditions so harsh that, as remarked to Scrooge in the play, “many would rather die” than seek shelter in one.
Dickens’ England was a class-struggle powder keg. But I type that sentence in America as myriad social media posts gleefully note a health insurance company CEO’s assassination.
Do the production’s props extend outside the theater? On the steps leading up to the entrance, I passed an empty champagne bottle and the boney remnants of a dumpster-dive meal.
My initial thought was, “Why hasn’t anyone cleaned up after the homeless?” I then realized, was I not thinking a bit like Scrooge thinks of unhoused Londoners?
Marley’s ghost tells Scrooge that he will be visited that night by the ghosts of Christmas Past, Present and Future. Each will take Scrooge on a journey: if what Scrooge encounters changes him, he may cast off his chains.
And it does so offering full dollops of stage magic for both old and young.
In the novella, Dickens describes the Ghost of Christmas Past as like an old man yet one whose “grasp” is “as gentle as a woman’s hand.” Taking the hint, ANW casts actress Trisha Miller as this ghost, which makes dramatic sense: she takes Scrooge to revisit his formative encounters with members of the female sex.
Miller also plays Scrooge’s anonymous charwoman. Please keep this in mind.
First Scrooge witnesses his sister Fan coming to bring the isolate schoolboy Scrooge home to a newly beneficent father. Fan will go on to give birth to Fred but perish soon after.
Next is time-travel forward to Scrooge’s youthful prime and his breakup with his fiancé, Belle (Roshni Shukla), who diagnoses Scrooge as idolatrous:
Belle: “It matters little--to you, very little. Another idol has displaced me; and if it can cheer and comfort you in time to come, as I would have tried to do, I have no just cause to grieve.”
Young Scrooge: “What Idol has displaced you?”
Belle: “A golden one.”
To switch idol for idol is an exchange. Seeking profitable exchanges, Scrooge frequents London’s Royal Exchange, a one-building Wall Street.
The Hebrew Bible, what Christians call the Old Testament, finds idolatry in the exchange and confusion of one deity for another, the deities losing their distinct singularity in the process, like two names (“Scrooge,” “Marley”) becoming indifferently exchangeable. Idolatrous exchange erases the beloved’s singularity in a fetish, an idol, a Golden Calf.
Fundamentally, Marx’s “commodity fetishism” notion has a biblical heritage.
Displaced by Scrooge’s new love of profit, Belle finds she was for him an idol he has exchanged for another. Played with quiet outrage, Shukla’s Belle would find solidarity with American punk feminist author Kathy Acker (1947-1997), who quipped: “Having any sex in the world is having to have sex with capitalism.”
After their faceoff over idolatry, Belle leaves Scrooge, never to return. In this scene the actors address each other across the empty stage, the void between them a correlate of their alienation.
The Ghost of Christmas Present (Anthony Adu) transports Scrooge to various Christmas celebrations, including that of the Cratchit family, whose Tiny Tim (Aria Zhang) faces a crippling illness that threatens his life. Mrs. Cratchit (Emily Kosloski) has some choice words to say about Scrooge.
With the Ghost of Christmas Future (David A. Rangel), Scrooge witnesses his “charwoman” (female servant) selling to a low-rent fence clothes and bed curtains she liberated from her employer’s corpse and deathbed. In the ANW production, this exuberant woman has with her comrades some cutting last laughs at Scrooge’s expense. She leads her sisters-in-struggle in a boisterous song celebrating Scrooge’s death.
Then there’s a visit to the Cratchit family now mourning Tiny Tim’s death. Finally, Scrooge confronts his own gravestone. Scrooge realizes that his was the corpse lying abed, the deceased the charwoman’s song calls a “nasty wicked old screw.”
Do ponder that last word.
After the shock of seeing his own grave, Scrooge awakes on Christmas morning in his bed, his past still behind him but his future still up for grabs.
Joyfully freed of his misanthropy and his miserliness, Scrooge sends an anonymous gift turkey to the Cratchits, offers a significant sum to the charity fundraisers he had rebuffed, and becomes a “second father” to Tiny Tim, who, alive, enjoys the gift of a full cure.
After Tiny Tim’s iconic “God bless us, everyone,” the play closes with a song celebrating Christmas.
This Christmas Carol dramatizes forcefully the novella’s meditations on the impasses between gift and exchange and on the desire for their overcoming.
And it does so offering full dollops of stage magic for both old and young.
When I attended, at intermission, from the back row children from the audience came rushing down to grab up some of the fiery, sparkling wafers of Christmas spirit the Ghost of Christmas Present had scattered about the stage.
Deets
- A Christmas Carol, A Noise Within, 3352 E. Foothill Blvd., Pasadena
- Schedule and tickets are available at the A Noise Within Web site or by calling the box office at (626) 356-3100
