Last year, American Conservatory Theater Artistic Director Pam MacKinnon was overseeing the final production of predecessor Carey Perloff’s popular adaptation of “A Christmas Carol,” which ran for nearly 20 years.
As she began the daunting task of crafting a new version for the renowned company, a friend suggested a post-modern approach: to make a production about staging a production of “A Christmas Carol.” She liked the idea and convinced the friend to write it.
The friend happens to be Obie Award-winning playwright Craig Lucas, author of “Prelude to a Kiss” and the musical adaptation of “Amélie,” which MacKinnon directed. Together, playwright and director came up with “A Whynot Christmas Carol,” a comedy about a small theater troupe putting on a bold new adaptation of Charles Dickens’ classic on a shoestring budget.
Opening in previews Nov. 26, it features ACT “Carol” veterans (including Dan Hiatt, Jomar Tagatac, Catherine Castellanos and Stacy Ross), newcomers (including Gianna DiGregorio Rivera, Rosie Hallett and Sara Toby Moore), and new music from The Kilbanes, whose Greek myth musical “Weightless” had one of its first performances on an ACT stage.
Working with Lucas, directing a new play by him for the third time, MacKinnon knew she was on the right track.
“Craig was the first writer who came to mind for this important project. I continue to feel his sensibility, rigor and curiosity are a perfect fit to wrestle with the Dickens and bring it to life,” says MacKinnon, who approached Lucas and designer David Zinn in 2019 thinking that they would collaborate on a unique version of “Carol” not tied to a specific interpretation.
“Part of the idea of our Whynot theater company digging into a new adaptation of ‘Carol’ is to make space for points of view beyond Ebenezer and his comeuppance,” she says. “Like me, these characters don’t question the story or the project writ large. They are all committed artists in the making of it. Nonetheless, serving a common good comes with its difficulties, conflicts and misunderstandings. How does a diverse group make anything greater than any one individual?”
Lucas, meanwhile, already has addressed Christmas foibles, in his 1983 dark comedy “Reckless” and the screenplay for its 1995 film adaptation.
He says the forced cheer of the season inevitably leads to a Charlie Brown-style disillusionment: “We so desperately want the Christmas holidays to be filled with all the good feelings we see in the media—the relentless piping of holiday songs at the post office and over the airwaves, and all the yard decorations—how can we help but fall prey to some attendant sorrows or disappointment? When genuine pleasure and goodness and fun is served up to us by corporations across all vistas, what can result is, naturally, a generalized cynicism.”
He also sees parallels between misers old and new: “As in our Gilded Age that directly preceded the Great Depression, we are indeed living through a time when large groups of powerful people are fomenting fear and doubt and deprivation and threats of punitive action and violence, as Scrooge does… Scrooge’s dark night of the soul certainly represents a hope many of us have for our collective salvation.”
Nevertheless, Lucas —who calls “’Moonstruck’ one of the best Christmas movies ever made!” —takes comfort knowing that “cynicism is not really big enough or reliable enough to squelch the impulse to come together and celebrate shared humanity at the winter solstice, whatever our spiritual tradition.”
Now six years into her tenure as ACT’s artistic director, MacKinnon mentions that the company has long held the honor of producing the Bay Area’s largest scale “Carol.” She adds, “I believe in the story. It’s a wonderful way for folks to step into a theater for the very first time. It is a mysteriously moving story that continues to fit the moment and deserves to be part of families’ and schools’ holiday.”
Between working on final script revisions and approving themed cocktails for the ACT’s bars, MacKinnon recalls advice she got about producing “Carol” from Perloff, who simply said, “Make it your own.”
American Conservatory Theater’s “A Whynot Christmas Carol” runs Nov. 26 through Dec. 24 at Toni Rembe Theater, 415 Geary St., San Francisco. Tickets are $29-$139 at act-sf.org.
Charles Lewis III is a San Francisco-born journalist and performing artist. He has written for the San Francisco Chronicle, KQED, the San Francisco Examiner, and many more. Dodgy evidence of this can be found at The Thinking Man’s Idiot.wordpress.com.
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