Click here to listen to the interview with Michael Gene Sullivan.
At this time of year, we are usually bombarded with works purporting to remind us of the real meaning of Christmas. At some point, Dickens’ A CHRISTMAS CAROL comes up with Tiny Tim’s plucky and heartfelt “God bless us, everyone,” and we are reminded that the business of humankind is humankind. As with so much in that seasonal classic, what contemporary readers would have made of that, as well as the gloss placed on the story by generations interpreting it in ways that made them feel warm, fuzzy, and comfortable, has caused the harsher elements to be softened. Fortunately, we have the San Francisco Mime Troupe to remind us what Dickens was really getting at: class struggle that blamed the poor for their destitution and justified the rich to feel entitled, superior, and smug as they refused to help. As Bob Cratchit points out in this vibrant stage production running through December 29 at Z Space, it’s not about Scrooge and his redemption, though it’s a start.
Set in a present day homeless encampment, it uses the denizens thereof playing multiple parts (except Mike McShane who plays only Scrooge) to drag the original message back onto, ahem, center stage. Instead of Christmas carols, there are labor anthems, and the oft overlooked plot point involving women telling Scrooge off is given proper pride of place. Salient points and annotations are achieved with characters stepping out of character long enough to ask us to consider such things as why Scrooge’s impoverished nephew, Fred, he of the irrepressible holiday spirit, is always depicted in a top hat and finery, and to explain just what it meant for the poor to be subjected to the treadmill Scrooge advocates before his redemption. It is brutal stuff, and as the play progresses, the capitalist insinuations placed there by previous productions preferring the warm fuzzies are revealed for what they are, and umbrage is taken. It’s not a repetitive pounding, though the fact that Scrooge is a banker is mentioned more than once, but it is so effective that by the time Velina Brown takes up her guitar to sing with soulful ire about banks of marble holding the silver earned by the working man and woman, one might ponder where the nearest rampart can be stormed.
Which is not to say that the Troupe, as is its wont, doesn’t find a veritable cornucopia of sardonic humor. In its long and storied history (Tony Award!), the Troupe has used satire and the broad humor of the Commedia Dell’ Arte to make its points. The Commadia here is toned down, but not the outrage that when there is money enough to feed and house everyone, children die in the street.
Micheal Gene Sullivan, who wrote and directed, also designed the one set used throughout. A random assemblage of packing boxed and the discards of the afflutent classes, it provides and wonderfully plastic environment that, with the dynamic use of sound effects, can seamlessly become a boys school, counting house (read bank), a graveyard, and all of the other locations Dickens dreamed up. Less is more, and the emotional pull of suggestion has no better example than the novel approach taken to depict Marley’s ghost on the door knocker of Scrooge’s front door. For eerie foreboding, it can’t be beat.
Nor can the passionate performances by a cast fueled by a burning desire to expose the class system for what it is. Sullivan does not stint on the pathos of Cratchit watching his crippled son starve to death, while also hinting that for the homeless person portraying him, it hits far too close to home.
To be sure A RED CAROL throws us the “S” word, that would be Socialism, and does so with reason and contemporary allusions and arguments that are difficult, if not impossible, to dispute. Particularly when, after an interlude about privatizing the school system, the children clinging to the ghost of Christmas Present, Want and Ignorance, take on a more ominous cast than in any other interpretation that I’ve come across. As Sullivan has said, if you come to a Mime Troupe performance and leave unchanged, they have not doen their job. A RED CAROL will shake your paradigm about more than how to absorb a holiday staple. It will also ask you what you plan on doing about that.
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