‘A Christmas Carol’ delivers Scroogeyness at its finest
There is a way to watch “A Christmas Carol” without thinking.
You can take in the Alley Theatre’s fantastic, fantastical presentation like a lozenge, focusing on the adorable children and rainbow of color rather than the psychological implications of childhood trauma or the socialist overtones of the Dickensian “community.”
You can go and have a good time.
But what fun is that? Just because the Alley is offering the season’s familiar and familial doesn’t mean interpretations of its show can’t change in exciting ways.
Granted, the Alley’s production is a marvel. “Carol” looks like a cross between steampunk and Tim Burton, the stage a dizzying array of black, blue and red showered in steam and snow. The star is as much Michael Wilson, who originally created this stage production — and hats
off to Alejo Vietti (costumes), Rui Rita (lighting) and Tony Straiges (scenic design) — as it is Jeffrey Bean, who returns as Ebenezer Scrooge in a cackling, rancorous display of Scroogeyness.
A flash of red, shooting up through hellish smoke from a trapdoor to present a dead man wrapped in golden chains, still arouses a sense of ghastly enchantment.
But just because Dickens’ story — about a petty, bitter old man who has forgotten the joy of life but then, after being visited by the Ghosts of Christmas Past, Present and Future, sees the world through a more hopeful perspective — is widely accepted doesn’t mean it isn’t also peculiar, radical, confusing and controversial.
“Carol” is worth watching again if not for the story itself but to see how your response to its politics have changed. You might find it the perfect story about community during a fractured time, or just another feel-good holiday tale that dares not address income inequality and oppression through direct means.
You might find this story of spreading joy appropriate for Christmastime, or an anti-capitalist tale that flies in the face of holiday shopping.
After all, “Carol” can be read as a socialist text (Karl Marx admired Dickens) presented during a time when people trample each other during Black Friday and when retail outlets — and theaters and ballets, for that matter — hope to profit enough to last them the rest of the year.
It tells us “money doesn’t matter” when everyone else is scrambling to buy televisions and sweaters as a metaphor for love.
In the end, “Carol” isn’t about economics as much as it is about joy, and its ideas about that are strange indeed. It suggests that you don’t need material objects to find happiness, or even a marriage or father figure. Joy is
something you can conjure out of nothing, like a ghost emerging from the ground.
To avoid Scroogeyness, simply change the way you look at things.
In other words, its “turn that frown upside down” morality says that happy people are happy because they choose to be, not because they are beneficiaries of privilege. Emotional health is a choice, it says, and depression is the fault of the victim, not a symptom
of a deeper issue.
The moral to “Carol,” for example, is the polar opposite to the one in the film “Inside Out.” In Pixar’s story about the balance of emotions, Joy pushes Sadness to the fringes, telling a pubescent girl to simply “be happy.” She’s the kid version of the Scrooge’s Christmas spirits, an embodiment of Clarence the Angel from “It’s a Wonderful Life” who shows a suffering soul how to smile. Look at your life through new eyes, these spirits say, and you’ll realize what a fool you’ve been.
But Joy’s plea to push Sadness away doesn’t work out in “Inside Out.” Sadness understands something about the dark complexity of human experience that Joy doesn’t. There is truth in tragedy, and to suppress that for joy is to tell a false story.
Scrooge’s father sent him to boarding school instead of raising him. His oldest sister, the closest companion he had, died while birthing a child. Do you really expect someone with that kind of upbringing to be a ray of sunshine?
The Scrooge isn’t a bad guy. He’s the dark antihero of a Dickensian tragedy. When he supposedly learns the value of holiday cheer, his father has still been absent in his life, his sister is still dead and he hasn’t talked to any therapists about any of it. His emotional issues haven’t been cured — they’ve been bandaged over with glitter and gift wrap.
This time of the year, many believe that what we want is not disturbance but comfort. We want the warmth of baked ham, cider and a classic redemption tale from Dickens. The Alley gives us exactly that, with style. And the morality of “Carol” seems to go down easy, like the spoonful of sugar in “Mary Poppins.” But sugar has its side effects.
We can interrogate what the Ghosts of Christmas are really saying about how to remedy a traumatic childhood. In two acts, Bean’s Scrooge transforms from dastardly to delightful and shows us the value of joy. But there is still darkness folded in his smile.
When the holiday hustle is over, and a lonely old man sits once again on his chair to ponder the day, think about what might happen to that merriment and cheer. Things are not so simple. The Scrooge may teach us another lesson yet.