Charles Dickens'
A Christmas Carol
A Cultural Heirloom
adapted by p. m. strain

This is a production that's all about me. Adapted, directed, scenic-lighting design. If you like it or don't like it (apart from the costumes) it's my fault.

REPRISED IN 2009 as a collaborative production with the Portage High School and performed at the Portage High School Auditorium. The production team stayed the same, with the addition of Amanda MacLeish-Maier as my Assistant Director, several of the actors reprised roles they had in 2007 and some took on new roles, and there were completely new actors as well. This show gives you (as it gave me) the unique opportunity to see, essentially the same show in two different spaces within the same location, with the same audience and give or take an issue du jour, the same time.

I will present the 2009 production photos alongside the 2007 with notes on the 2009 production in white.

Poster design by Patrick Strain

Selected research images:

Attic with stuff.	A source of color, warmth of "Christmas Present."
A source for space, but also an image of Christmas yet to come.

Production Photos:

2007 PRODUCTION - PORTAGE CENTER FOR THE ARTS, seats 287		2009 PRODUCTION - PORTAGE HIGH SCHOOL, seats 641
The family discovers the Scrooge and Marley sign. You can see right away we had more real estate to deal with in 2009.
Cratchit and Scrooge in the office. 2009 production - "Freida" with Scrooge. Also, you can start to see the availability of more lighting.
Scrooge and young Scrooge listen to Fan, while the ghosts of Christmas Past (played by twins Leah and Emma Harvey in 2007) look on. Here, I actually like the look and feel of the 2007 photo - more a memory attic attained, but the movement in 2009 was able to be more fluid, I think.
Scrooge and the Ghost of Christmas Present. Mostly here as a thank you to my costume designer - aren't these simply lovely?		Same costumes, but different part in the script - just too nice a photo to pass up. Also, you get to see that we had access for a good trap door, the lack of which in 2007 made this moment less magical.
The Cratchit family. Same mom and dad - different kids.
The party at Fred's (or due to casting choices in 2009, Freida's) house.
The churchyard and the Ghosts of Christmas Yet to Come, portrayed by numerous (and ever changing) actors. In the 2009 production, we abandoned the tabletop tombstone for a glowing Scrooge face - more appropriate to the convention of the people as gravestones, eerier, and better seen from a distance.

Production Notes: I wore many hats on this production - writer/director as well as scenic/lighting designer as well as producer. For more on the script, please see my Playwrighting Page. For a bit more on the design of the show, visit my ZGYPT page.The production values, as seems to be the leitmotif of my theatrical career, were spare. The budget tight, the space limiting, the rehearsal period frequently interrupted. The space I designed evoked an attic, with a small Victorian-style circular section. The area was beset with scenic pieces, props and odd costume bits. Once the play began, my goal was to make all of the costumes and props seem as if they had been just pulled from the surrounding chaos and the characters enter and exit fluidly, never halting the action. Of course, actors did leave the stage and costumes and props were retrieved from off stage, but the action never halted.

As the director, I had already been envisioning the prodcution all through the writing process. I was influenced, as I noted on my playwrighting page, by the Commonweal production, and wanted to use that simple theatrical aesthetic here on this production. Many of the actors being novice, I decided to forego an accent and keep them in as natural a voice as possible. Even the woman playing Marley did so mostly in her vocal range. The children playing the innocents, the youth playing up the scarey parts, and the adults playing mostly the presenters of information worked well.

I had no grand "concept" for the show - though telling the story within the framework of a family descended from Tiny Tim is, of course, a concept in itself. The essential throughline, though never beaten to death (and isn't that the best way to have a throughline?) is that family is more imporatant than money, and love (in this play especially viewed in the Christian view of self-sacrificing love) is what really matters. So, I trusted in Dickens' work and just let the story tell itself.

2009 Production Note Addendum: When I (we - the whole production team) revisited the script for the reprise in 2009, the main challenge was to blow the show up to fill the space without blowing the show to pieces. Technically (seen on the ZGYPT design page) that meant larger pieces and broader strokes, while trying to keep the overall feeling. For the most part, that was true for the acting as well, more space, broader movements, bolder choices, but we also had a pretty decent sound system, so we were able to mic the actors and keep a fairly intimate feeling to the voice. Having more real estate to move around on allowed us to be a little more theatrical in our entrances and exits, moving people off and on stage with more freedom.

One prime example of this is Morley. In the 2007 production our Morley simply had a suit coat and hat. While we didn't go for the all our "GHOST" look in our 2009 production either, but we did add hanging books and lock-boxes. Another change was the door and knocker. In 2007 this was the simple addition of a ring in the mouth of the person playing the door knocker. In 2009 we had a glowing Morley face mask on the door knocker.

The single biggest change in the direction was the choice to use accents for this productions. I added a line into the script that the teens in 2007 cried out for, "Can we use accents this time?" I am deeply indebted to Paul Meier's resource, Accents and Dialects for the Stage and Screen as well as my assistant director, Amanda MacLeish-Maier for the success of the accents. I highly recommend Pau's resources - they were excellent, and as for Amanda - you have to get your own AD who has a great ear for accent. Amanda was able to keep a constant vigil and work one on one with actors to get the accents to where we needed them. Our basic approach was to keep the actors in THEIR voice, and then add just enough of a vineer or accent to make it work. We may have been criticized by a truly astute student of accent that our work was not heavy enough, but we certainly did not go over the top. We used Standard British for most characters, with the Cratchits using Hampshire and The Ghost of Christmas Past going into Cockney. This added two weeks to the rehearsal schedule, but is certainly necessary, and is needed for ALL actors who don't have formal accent training. By the way, watching and copying Monty Python is does not accent training make.

 

For inquiries about performance royalties for this script, please e-mail me.