Could you talk about how this production started, and how it has changed over the years?

Jefferson: This particular production, as you know, has no history. I haven't done it yet. I remember something that Anne Bogart once said to me: “If you know what a play is going to be before you start rehearsal, why are you doing it?” So this production is a new thing entirely. And that’s what excites and cows me.

But it began when my wife Susan Lyons and I were wandering through the La Brea Tar Pits, walking the dog, and we ran into the artistic director of the Geffen Theatre, Matt Shenkman. We got to talking about projects, and he said, “Is there anything you'd like to do?” And it just floated to the top of my mind: “I would like to do a one-person version of A Christmas Carol.” And he said, “Great, let's do it.” It was one of the most painless pitches of an idea I've ever experienced.

Then, over the course of that summer, Susan and I went through the unexpurgated original novel, and we discovered Dickens's own rather brutal cut of the text. He reduced a novel that takes about three hours to read to, I think, an hour and fifteen minutes. It was the actor Dickens who was able to instinctively cut away all the dross and reduce it to this nice, tight little evening of theater or recitation.  So we started to fashion what we hoped would ultimately become a tenable evening of storytelling theater.

I love to make lists at the beginning of every project. I write what I know, and I list all these absolutes about what this project is and what it isn't, which is, of course, a beautiful exercise, because it never turns out that way. But it's useful to pretend to be absolute about it. And what I knew at that time was that there was going to be nothing, nothing on stage, just me and this story. Maybe a table, and maybe one chair, and maybe an evocative soundscape that would provide some sort of oral texture. Essentially, I said, I want to be the special effect.

But then Matt introduced us to the wonderful Michael Arden, who had a long history with A Christmas Carol and a love as for it as passionate as my own, from a very early age. Michael became the third adapter, and he enlisted the help of the magnificent design team with whom he works. Dane Laffrey, a set designer—although it's not really fair to call him a set designer; he's sort of an architect of dreams. Josh Reed, his sound designer, who was there on day one. Lucy Mckinnon designed projections; her husband, Ben Stainton, designed lights. So I very quickly realized that the production was going to be enormous: a rotating set, scenic elements, projections, a fireplace, actual open-flame candles. I was quickly seduced by these wonderful visuals and sounds, and that’s how the production became what we did at the Geffen. And that production was filmed at the United Palace Theater in Washington Heights during the height of the pandemic, where I was playing to an audience of empty, utterly empty seats. It was filmed and sent around the country as a fundraiser for beleaguered regional theaters. We also did a cinematic version of it, not just the stage capture, with a few more bells and whistles, if you can imagine, which is being released on Hulu and Netflix this Christmas.

But what we’re building at the Globe is going to be something completely different.

It's a return in many ways to the project as you originally envisioned it, yes?

Yes, and I am excited to return to the storytelling aspects, because this is how I first experienced A Christmas Carol. It wasn't delivered to me in a memorized fashion, but my parents read it to me, during some cold December nights in the late seventies. It was shortly after our television fell off a table and smashed to smithereens. The family Basset hound was chasing the cat, and they got caught amongst the cord, and it fell. We were all gathered there to watch Wild Kingdom—I think it was on Sunday night after dinner—and the television was ruined. And so my dad picked a sort of yellowed volume off the shelf and opened it and began to read. “Marley was dead, to begin with.” He would read a section and then pass it to my mother, and she would continue. It kept my siblings and I absolutely transfixed on the sofa while they read the entire thing, which took several hours at least.

In many ways it was a seminal moment for me, because it introduced me to theatre in its purest form: able performers, a great story, and a and a rapt audience. I remember distinctly my father’s lovely, detached narrator's voice. And then my mother would take the book, and she would transform into whatever character she was reading. She would become Marley's Ghost. She would become Little Fan, the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come, Ebenezer Scrooge, and Fezziwig, and I remember being frightened almost by seeing this woman, who was so familiar to me, transformed before my very eyes. And at that moment I thought: Oh, God. I want to do this sort of magic.

I hope that this experience for the Globe audience will be kind of like that, so that they'll get a wonderful story told to them, and there will be these fleeting, flickering magic lantern glimpses of characters throughout that will be very vivid and clear. It'll be stripped down to almost story theater, and I've never done that. It terrifies me, quite frankly, because it's really performing without a net. I just want to see, how far can this text go? I want it to be one of those experiences in which you, as an audience member, lean into what's happening on stage and participate jointly in the imaginative, collaborative act of fashioning an evening of theatre.