Oklahoma holiday tradition
Guthrie’s Pollard Theatre marks its 30th run of ‘A Territorial Christmas Carol’
In August 1987, Christmas arrived early for Stephen P. Scott. And as with many holiday happenings, it brought with it high hopes and a tight deadline.
In those late summer days in the late 1980s, the Oklahoma writer was tapped by Charles Suggs II, the original producing director of Guthrie’s Pollard Theatre, to pen a Christmas show that the fledgling company could parlay into a beloved institution.
“He told me that they wanted a big play, that this was gonna become this huge tradition. And we talked about it and he liked the idea of an adaptation of ‘Christmas Carol.’ It seems like those are always fairly successful, and the territorial Christmas angle, that was already a tradition in Guthrie,” Scott recalled on a recent autumn afternoon at his home in the Little Axe area of rural Norman.
“This was about the middle of August, and I had to have the preliminary script ready for staged readings by around the first of October. So, I went home and started doing research.”
In about six weeks, Scott penned “A Territorial Christmas Carol,” and indeed provided the foundation for a stalwart tradition: His adaptation of the Charles Dickens’ iconic tale of yuletide redemption is The Pollard’s all-time best-selling show, which the Guthrie theater this season is staging for the 30th year.
“I had developed a reputation for delivering on tight deadlines. I didn’t sleep a whole lot in the time between starting and getting into staged readings,” the author said with a grin while sitting in his cozy kitchen, surrounded by a collection of cookie jars and a pack of elderly rescue dogs.
“I wrote the play on spec. I didn’t get any royalties or anything for the first year. In fact, I worked backstage … helping with things and wrangling kid actors at times and was just right there in that first year’s production. If it hadn’t become a tradition, if it hadn’t been performed again, it was still worth it because (there’s been) so many wonderful people. That’s the big thing about this 30 years is it’s always been this wonderful group of people.”
Stories and legends
Raised on a farm in the Oklahoma Ozarks near the Arkansas border, Scott, 63, grew up with a love for the kind of history that doesn’t often get taught in schools.
“I grew up in an area with lots of legends: Jesse James used to hide out there, Stand Watie was a big figure from the Civil War there, we had a number of Civil War battlefields around us. But I really didn’t know that much about the Land Run of 1889. I was aware of land runs and everything, but I’m from a different part of the state,” Scott said. “But I’ve always loved Guthrie. My grandmother — my dad’s mother — lived there when I was growing up and we used to visit. … Guthrie is kind of living history.”
His passion for writing also grew naturally. His father, William R. Scott, wrote novels to support his farming. Under the pen name Weldon Hill, the elder Scott penned several books, including The New York Times Bestseller “Onionhead,” which was adapted into a 1958 feature film starring Andy Griffith, and “The Long Summer of George Adams,” which was made into a 1982 TV movie starring fellow Oklahoman James Garner.
“I’ve always written. I always had a typewriter growing up. We all did. We would get my dad’s handme-downs. When he’d get a new one, one of us would get the old one,” recalled Scott, who grew up the fourth of five children.
He got into playwrighting when he joined Street Players Theater, a Norman-based touring company that performed original shows throughout the state and beyond in the 1980s. Through the traveling troupe he became acquainted with some key figures in The Pollard’s development: James Ong, who has become a mainstay in “A Territorial Christmas Carol,” and Donna Dickson, the Guthrie company’s original stage manager and future managing director, who died in 2011.
“I think Stephen’s adaptation is just brilliant, and it’s an excellent story to begin with,” said Ong, who has played several parts in “A Territorial Christmas Carol” but has embodied the lead role of Ebenezer Scrooge for at least 17 years. “It was one of the first stories I’ve ever read where the characters weren’t just that black and white (of) you’re evil, you’re good. When you play it, you have to kind of see the possibilities, the inherent good in Scrooge, which has been suppressed somewhat by his materialistic side.
I don’t like to think of him as a bad guy. He’s a good guy who’s almost the classic tragic figure, a good man who has fallen because of a character flaw.”
Land runs and big breaks
Set in Guthrie shortly after the Land Run of 1889, “A Territorial Christmas Carol” introduces settlers Ben and Elizabeth Moody, who with their forlorn son William are facing a holiday season without family and friends. On a snowy night, they open their frontier home to three visitors: cavalry scout John Kettle, who presents the family with smoked meat; traveling teacher Hamilton Moore, who gifts the family a bundle of oranges; and an enigmatic Englishman named Charlie, who offers to tell a story in lieu of a gift.
“Once you get into the story that this Charlie character is telling, it stays true to not only the spirit of the Dickens novella but to a certain degree some of the language. I think there were some places where Stephen adjusted terms because of the nature of Dickens’ language … so the audience followed it fairly easily and was instantly transported— but the tone certainly of the language is the same,” said W. Jerome Stevenson, The Pollard’s current producing artistic director.
“In a way, Dickens is almost like messing with Shakespeare ... so we really have to keep very close to the telling of the tale.”
When he set out to adapt the famous story, Scott said he knew he needed to maintain the key characters and plot points: Scrooge and his haunting by his deceased partner, Jacob Marley; the other three ghosts that visit the miser on the night before Christmas; and Scrooge’s relationships with his everhopeful nephew Fred, his long-suffering employee Bob Cratchit and the young and ailing Tiny Tim.
“I researched everything. I researched what kind of names would these people have. … I had to study the people of the Kansas City area and St. Louis area of that time, because that’s where people came flooding in from,” he said. “It just seems like such a daunting task now, even with the internet — which I didn’t have back then.”
Although Guthrie’s early days and Dickens’ Christmas fable both took place in the Victorian era, the writer said he had to develop characters, dialogue and details to make his adaptation true to the territorial setting. He studied everything he could find about the Oklahoma land runs and read “A Christmas Carol” over and over with a highlighter.
“When I watch the play, I think, ‘Good grief, I didn’t change any of this.’ And then I go back and read the novel and it’s like, ‘I changed a lot. Really a lot,’ ” Scott said with a laugh. “As reviewers have pointed out over the last 30 years a number of times, it has flaws. But those flaws became kind of ingrained in the tradition of the play. It just seems to have continued to be really popular year after year. It’s kind of amazing.”
Christmas blessing and lasting influence
From Disney and “Star Trek” to the Muppets and the Flintstones, few works have been as widely adapted as “A Christmas Carol,” which has become so influential that a new feature film offering a fictionalized account of its writing is literally titled “The Man Who Invented Christmas.”
“Folks is folks. We all have the same emotions,” Scott said. “That’s why something like that works ... because we can all relate to dealing with somebody like Scrooge. We can all have our heartstrings plucked by Tiny Tim. It just all resonates no matter what. That’s why we can still go back and do a film about Cleopatra or something from Shakespeare, because love is still love and a broken heart is still a broken heart.”
Scott married the onetime girl next door the year after “A Territorial Christmas Carol” premiered, and The Pollard cast and crew paid for their honeymoon stay at a Guthrie bed-and-breakfast. Between their children and foster children, he and wife Kathryn have seven offspring, plus 14 grandchildren, with one more on the way, and two great-grandsons.
Although he hasn’t penned any more plays, Scott continues to write. He has created several science fiction novels, with characters ranging from a futuristic hit man to cannibal serial killers, and published two blogs on modern-day homesteading, which feature recipes, gardening tips and musings. Over the years, he’s also worked as a printer, teaching assistant, graphic designer, computer technician, goat farmer and more.
While he was building a full and varied life, his Christmas play was developing a life of its own in Guthrie, where it has become a traditional part of the community’s Victorian Christmas festivities. Out of The Pollard’s 31 seasons, Stevenson said the company has only left out “A Territorial Christmas Carol” once, in 1990, but he said even O. Henry’s poignant “Gift of the Magi” just didn’t resound with audiences like Scott’s hometown version of Dickens’ beloved tale.
“For a lot of people, this is how their Christmas begins. Literally, they see this show and then they go, ‘Now, we need to go put up the lights,’ ” Stevenson said.
For Scott and his wife, going to a performance or dress rehearsal of “A Territorial Christmas Carol” once was an annual part of their Christmas merrymaking, but health problems have prevented him from attending the past several years. He said now that he has recovered they’re hoping to establish a new tradition of making the annual trek to Guthrie, starting this year during the 30th anniversary run.
“I don’t think of it as I’m part of their Christmas. I have the same experience: I go and see the play, and it’s like the years that I do, I have the Christmas spirit better than any other times. During that run of the play between Thanksgiving and Christmas, that’s all about the acting and the magic of the theater. I’m such a tiny part of it that … I don’t think of it as having to do with me, even though I know it does,” he said. “I’ve told people a few times that I’m very famous in a small town in Oklahoma. … It’s such a huge blessing in my life that I got to be a part of all this.”