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This has been quite a journey.
Velina and I were talking the other day about how big a part of our lives together "A Christmas Carol" has been. I’m not talking about seeing the movies or television specials, I’m talking about actually a part.
I didn't start singing or doing theatre until I was a senior in high school, and that year it just so happened our choir sang at the Dickens Faire. I'd been a few times with my mother before that, but never in costume, let alone performing. Velina was in the choir too, so we both had our first Dickensian performance together.
After we graduated I wanted to keep performing, so I formed a Christmas Caroling choir - The Star Carolers - and for years Velina and I sang at the Dickens Faire and around the City. Christmas was always my mother's favorite holiday. She was an artist, and when we were kids each year she would design and build a unique Christmas tree. After she passed away I kept up that tradition for a few years, making a small tree for my apartment. still have one of them.
Now to be clear: my family was not religious in anyway. My parents were all about philosophers and revolutionaries, writers and comedians. Our household was about changing the world with direct action and art - and having fun doing it. So I guess for my mother the call to action of Dickens’ work, particularly “ A Christmas Carol,” was important, and The Dickens Faire was an artistic way to have some fun while celebrating social commentary.
The Star Carolers won a few competitions, were on the radio a few times, and was making good money for all of the singers, but as my acting career picked up the less time I had to perform in the choir, and eventually it faded away. But I wasn't done with "A Christmas Carol, and vice versa.
A year later Velina and I auditioned for a school tour show, Kaiser Hospital's "Professor Bodywise's Traveling Menagerie.” We each had 2 minutes audition slots, and I asked if we could audition together and have 5 minutes. They said yes, and I decided to write something that would let us each play a variety of characters - a five-minute version of “A Christmas Carol.” Just us and one top hat, and whichever of us had the hat was Scrooge in that section. We were bot cast, and that version went over so well we later performed it in front of an audience live on Ben Fong Torres’ Fog City Radio!
A couple years later ACT, after a hiatus, decided to remount Laird Williamson’s “Carol” adaptation, and Velina and I were cast. By then we were married and in the Mime Troupe, and this meant that for two productions each year - about five months - we got to work together! (Somebody asked me back then what it was like to be with Velina so much, and I said if I didn’t want to spend time all the time I could with her I wouldn’t have married her.) I played The Ghost of Christmas Past, and Velina and I played a couple at Fred’s Party. In the following years Velina played Scrooge’s charwoman, and one of the Charitables who ask Scrooge for a donation, and I played Fred, and the Ghosts of Past and Future. Velina then went on to play The Ghost of Christmas Present when ACT produced Carey Perloff's adaptation. So between us we have played all the Ghosts.
But doing “A Christmas Carol” at ACT also taught me something: People don’t always get it. One time, after a show, I was collecting for Equity Fights AIDS. Full costume, in the lobby of The Geary Theatre, and a patron sniffed “How dare they ask for money after a show like this!” They had missed the whole damn point of the show. After that I added to my pitch about Equity Fights AIDS that I they didn’t want to give us any money to remember that there are people who live on the steps of the theatre every night, and they could use help, too. Not sure how that went over with ACT (though one employee did suggest I stop) but I felt it was important to remind people of the real message of the show. It seemed to me that for too many audience members Christmas Carol was about making them feel better because they weren’t as bad, as miserly, as thoughtless as Scrooge. Oh, they could step over the homeless and avert their eyes to the suffering outside as they bought shit they didn’t need in Union Square shops, but they weren’t as bad as old Ebenezer! They may support the system that oppresses, they may profit from the misery it creates, they may see themselves as deserving and the workers as undeserving - but they weren’t as bad as Scrooge! They left the theatre feeling they were on the side of compassion because Dickens hadn’t specifically named them. Besides - that was then and this is now.
And in so many modern versions everyone is kinda happy EXCEPT Scrooge. It's like the whole thing is about making this one guy happy. Everyone else is all in the holiday spirit except this one jerk, and if he changes everything is fixed. All the grinding cruelty and poverty and heartlessness of the age of industrial Capitalism Dickens was railing against had been swept away to make subscribers and tv audiences feel good.
And that was when the idea of “A Red Carol” was born. I wanted to challenge people, and remind people that this great activist, dangerous, world-changing story was built to insist on our shared humanity, to grab us by the shoulders and shake us into seeing the terrible world we were allowing to be built around us, and that it was up to us to not be self-satisfied bricks in the wall.
This story really had changed the world, and now that we were sliding back to the social and economic horrors Dickens wrote about I wanted people to see that they had been lulled and lied to. They shouldn’t feel good about themselves after seeing “A Christmas Carol,” they should feel outraged at the world outside the theatre. And if they weren’t they might just be as bad as Scrooge.
When my “1984” was a hit at The Actors’ Gang Tim Robbins asked me if I had another script for them, and I told him I had another in my mind - “A Christmas Carol” - which I was thinking of as a winter show for The Troupe. He was interested, but I didn’t finish the adaptation in time for their next season. But at that point Occupy Wall Street was in full swing, and I approach the Mime Troupe and Occupy Oakland about doing a staged reading on Christmas Eve 2011. The reading went well - even got an article in the LA Times - but The Troupe could never managed to have the money for an actual production, and Tim had moved on to a different annual show.
It wasn’t until the pandemic shutdown, and The Troupe produced our radio play series as our summer show, that the script came up again. I’d written nine shows, and after the summer the idea of continuing online came up. What else did I have? I said “A Red Carol,” and got to work on a radio adaption. I'd done a reading with the Playwright's Foundation the year a couple years before, and that went fairly well. It had just been for the playwrights, and when we finished the only thing outstanding was the name. At that point the show was still called "A Christmas Carol," and i mentioned i wasn't totally happy with that. Even though I felt my adaptation was closer to what Dickens intended I didn't want people to feel misled. The playwrights agreed, and I mentioned that Velina had suggested "A Red Carol." They said THAT'S PERFECT!
Anyway I felt good with the stage version, but now I had to adapt "A Red Carol" for radio, a very different medium. You have to build all the images in the listener's mind. Luckily I listen to a lot of radio plays. And I do mean a lot. Like daily. So it was a challenge, but at least I already knew the form, and we already knew how to record a play with actors all across the country. It actually went very well, and we got to work with some amazing actors who had never been in a Troupe show before - including my old friend Mike McShane as Scrooge. The radio version was then broadcast the following three years each Christmas on stations across the country.
Finally it seemed like the time had come for a stage version. In 2022 we got a grant from the NEA to do a monthlong workshop at Cutting Ball Theatre and then, after a year of individual fundraising, and a cancelled opening in 2023, then another year of fundraising, and a lot of meetings with Z Space, we finally got here. Velina has been in each version, as well as McShane, Mime Troupe vets Keiko, Lisa, in addition to Brian and Jed.
Velina has said how wonderful it is to be onstage again with Keiko and Lisa. It has been a while since all three were together. She and I also talk about how full circle this feels. We’ve been doing the Dickens together since we were teenagers, and this story has been interestingly key in our lives as artists, and as a couple.
I’m so glad we got the this point, and got to share this particular vision of it with folks.
Whew.
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