Co-writer and director Gordon Greenberg discusses bringing Charles Dickens’s classic to zany life at The Old Globe.
Interview by Danielle Mages Amato
A Christmas Carol is one of the most enduring narratives in the world. I first discovered it via Mister Magoo’s Christmas Carol when I was a kid, and I was engaged enough to dig into the original Dickens at the local library. (This was back in the stone ages, when we had to go to a library to find a book!) Though I was initially drawn to the ghost story, it was the core idea of repentance that made me a believer. This is a story about waking up, literally and figuratively. It comforted me to think that anyone was capable of change, even bullies like Scrooge. Since then I have followed the many adaptations over the years with great interest. I even did a riff on it for Disney a few years back, called Believe, using their characters and music, and although it wasn’t set at Christmas, the DNA of the story itself was very powerful. It is so well constructed that characters can be transposed into different contexts without sacrificing weight or relevance. In every iteration, from the original to The Muppets, it is the simple yet profound idea that we are all capable of change that fuels this great story.
It takes a sturdy narrative to withstand the level of playful, abstract storytelling Steve Rosen and I love most: the anarchic story theatre that the Royal Shakespeare Company made popular decades ago with Nicholas Nickleby, another Dickens novel. And since A Christmas Carol provides us with a similarly strong and clear spine, we knew this form of theatre would make a great match. Embracing the cast as storytellers, narrating as they slip in and out of specific roles, would remind the audience that they were watching an act of great daring, vulnerability, and creative spark, that this is theatre from the heart. That sense of spontaneity allows us to be as silly as we wish and still hold onto the humanity at the story’s center.
For starters, snow! There isn’t much of it. Of course, we soon realized it was that very fact that would make for a terrific and rare event in the play: snow in San Diego! It happens, but not often. This would take place during one such winter. The next question was time period, since the original Dickensian Victorian era, which is full of so many delicious details, was still a nascent period for San Diego. Fast forward 20 years, though, and you are in the midst of one of the biggest growth periods in American history. We decided to make Scrooge a British émigré who moved to San Diego to seek his fortune in serving the financial needs of the Panama–California Exhibition. The rest unfolded from there, allowing us to set the entire play right here in Balboa Park and the surrounding communities, and then to skip back in time to Scrooge’s childhood in Victorian England. We ended up with the best of both worlds, the new and the old.
Thankfully I have an amazing collaborator in Steve Rosen. Writing with Steve is an exercise in self-restraint. If we’re not careful, we end up spending the day telling stories, playing word games, and making each other laugh. Come to think of it, that’s basically what we do. But we funnel it all into the work. I suppose we trick ourselves into letting our imaginations flow freely, so as not to self-edit, and then somehow find the sense to organize it into a dramaturgical bento box that creates a narrative shape. (In the case of Scrooge, we had a great shape to start with.) As we dream up a script, I try to imagine the staging opportunities for our various flights of fancy. Frequently, the more implausible something seems, the more fun it will be to stage. We like to play with ideas like impossibly fast character and location changes, odd conveyances of information, music, magic, and character doubling, tripling, etc. But we always begin with the idea that drives the play. Why this story? Why these characters? Why now? In the case of Scrooge, it was and will always be redemption. And in this adaptation, the healing power of a shared theatrical experience. If it’s an idea that is meaningful and rich to you, then it becomes a well you can access whenever you reach an impasse in the story or in a scene.
This is a tough show to cast. The fewer actors you use, the more each one has to be able to do. We are asking a group of five actors to play over 50 roles, with varying dialects, temperaments, and even genders, in addition to singing, dancing, and playing musical instruments. Oh yeah, and they all have to be funny. And different from each other. And preferably with some connection to San Diego. What you are seeing on stage is the result of many months of casting, both in San Diego and New York. And this is a group of theatrical athletes; heroes, each and every one. I am in awe of what they do!
The toughest part of creating this sort of hyper-theatricalized work is boiling down your physical production to its essence. In other words, “essentializing.” It’s a deceptively rigorous and lengthy process. You know how when you pack at the last minute, you always pack too much? This is similar. It takes a lot of planning to essentialize what exactly we will need to tell the story in the most elegant, economical fashion. That applies to set pieces as well as costumes and sound. Every element needs to be carefully chosen and thought through, both for character and for pragmatism. It’s a long process of spewing ideas and then vetting them one by one. Being concise is a lengthy affair! As the French philosopher Blaise Pascal said, “If I had more time, I would have written a shorter letter.”
Coming back to this piece in the wake of 18 months of isolation is especially poignant. We all now have a very personal understanding of what it means to be separated from our friends, families, and communities. Like Scrooge, we have lived through a drought of humanity and are suddenly privy to connection again. And it feels like nourishment. The idea that we’re now sitting in a theatre together, in person, would have been unthinkable a year ago. Now, it is cause for celebration.
Joyful! This is a show that celebrates family, community, and theatre itself.
