It’s a measure of the greatest art that no matter how many times we encounter it, it retains its capacity to affect us — to move us, to shed fresh light on questions of our existence, to make us laugh or shake us out of our complacency. Its familiarity doesn’t lessen its potency. Instead, it provides the reader or viewer or hearer, who knows by heart the main thoroughfares of the classic work, a chance to dart down new alleys or admire previously unseen vistas.
And, honestly, what piece of literature could be more familiar this time of year than Charles Dickens’s “A Christmas Carol” — or more penetrating?
The Allen Community College Theatre Department lights a new fire under this old chestnut in a modern play-within-a-play staging of the yuletide tale adapted by writer Doris Baizley.
There’s nothing to make a play go splat faster than a weak lead. Particularly in a work like “A Christmas Carol,” where the querulous Scrooge stalks the stage from start to finish.
But it isn’t enough, in portraying the famous miser on stage, to grimace and growl and ready your stream of bah-humbugs. You must also, at the very same time, somehow — subtly, with some shine in the eye or knack of the face or through some unknowable charisma — signal to the audience a capacity for redemption. An audience must believe that within the ash heap of Ebenezer’s insides a small ember still glows. It was the achievement of the greatest of all filmic Scrooges — Alistair Sim in the 1951 adaptation — but of course this level of emotional intricacy requires real acting.
Luckily for ACC, it has in its Scrooge a real actor.
Iola native Judd Wiltse has located in the distillery of his brain the precise combination of bile and charm to make his Ebenezer Scrooge fizz for the play’s full 75 minutes. This character, Scrooge — who finds that when it comes to the milk of human kindness, he’s lactose intolerant — has found in Wiltse a vector of perfect belligerence and no small amount of sympathy.
Truly, though, there isn’t a weak link in the lineup. Every actor here plays at least two parts; one actor plays seven.
Austin Wickwire, who portrays (among other characters) Jacob Marley, Scrooge’s old associate at the counting house, is a convincing ghost, whose spectral peregrinations are driven by his intense regret at the life he led, the kindnesses he avoided, his unchecked avarice. “I wear the chain I forged in life,” the ghost tells Scrooge in Dickens’s original. “In life my spirit never roved beyond the narrow limits of our money-changing hole. … Why did I walk through crowds of fellow-beings with my eyes turned down[?]”
Ian Malcolm, on the other hand, plays Mr. Fezziwig, Scrooge’s former employer, whose affection and generosity should serve as a golden example to bosses everywhere. “He has the power to render us happy or unhappy; to make our service light or burdensome; a pleasure or a toil,” observed Scrooge of his former supervisor upon being whisked backward into the offices of his first job by the Ghost of Christmas Past. “Say that his power lies in words and looks; in things so slight and insignificant that it is impossible to add and count ’em up: what then? The happiness he gives, is quite as great as if it cost a fortune.”
And what is “A Christmas Carol” without the penniless Crachits, Bob — the overworked, underpaid second to the sinister Scrooge — and his semi-saccharine son, Tiny Tim, the becrutched boy whose small fists yank with mournful force on our stiffened heartstrings.
Brogan Falls, with his battered bowler and gentle mien, is the ideal Bob Crachit. As for Tiny Tim, the production could not have done better than elementary-school actor Cole Moyer, whose portrayal of the malnourished tot is unaffected and — though harder hearts may contest it — tremendously moving. Moyer is even a whiz on a wooden crutch, which comes in handy when he’s asked to hobble down a long flight of stairs.
Chloe Bedell, who also plays Mrs. Crachit, is most affecting as the Ghost of Christmas Past, who whirls across the stage with apparitional lightness, catching our antihero in the folds of her skirt and transporting him to the plains of his hardscrabble boyhood.
Aubrie Arevalo and Paige Durand team up to play the Ghosts of Christmas Present. The spectral duo, wearing — for some reason — clown wigs, emit a spritz of comedy into the otherwise lugubrious proceedings. As a side, it would be well worth attending the show purely to see Durand perform her inspired impression of a parrot.
Although enacted on a blank stage, ACC’s production manages to infuse the small box theater with the aroma of Victorian London: The brew of soot and fog. The flicker of lamplight. The damp cobblestones and darkening alleys. The drafty counting house where Scrooge labors with mirthless obsession.
More importantly, though, the play, under the direction of Tony Piazza, retains the moral sturdiness and clarifying sadness of the original and continues to stand as a melancholy reminder that our time on this side of the soil is sickeningly brief, and that the kindnesses we commit over the span of our short lives — though most of them will go uncredited — actually matter.
“A Christmas Carol” runs tonight through Saturday at the ACC theatre beginning at 7:30 p.m. Tickets are $6 for adults and $4 for students. Allen students enter free. Tickets are available at the Iola pharmacy and at the door.
