DICKENS' A CHRISTMAS CAROL M. Hunter ccSCOOP Review A Christmas Carol! George C. Scott did it. Albert Finney, Alastair Sim, Patrick Stewart, Mr. Magoo, the Muppets, the Flintstones, and Fats Waller did it. David Anderson does it. (Okay, I lied about Fats Waller.) Anderson and his director Ted Pugh are in some excellent and some questionable company, as well as that of many community theaters and the fourth-grade class of Lincoln Park Elementary school. Everybody does A Christmas Carol.

But, trust this Walking the dog Theater pair to scrape away any residual crud and do what the theatrical, dramatic Dickens himself might have done in his public readings. They do the text.

Entering the small theater space at 360 Warren Street is like entering someone’s underwater parlor, joining forty-nine of your most pleasant acquaintances to spy on the travails of Scrooge. (“Underwater” because of high ceilings and sponged, dark blue walls.)

The stage area looks warm and Walking-the-dog spare. Less friendly is the light that spills from the stage, robbing the audience of that comforting audience anonymity.

Everything David Anderson touches has two crucial elements: clarity and humanity; however, there is a softness in this production that might have seemed odd to Dickens. Where is the author’s rumbling resentment? His anger at the monstrous gulf between rich and poor? The incomes mortgaged, the exploitation of laboring classes, the flaming contempt of the moneyed for the un-moneyed? (You think that I have slipped over to 2008. Yes, and Tiny Tim requires health care.)

From the page, Dickens’ horror of industrialized England rises passionate and true, although one may wonder if the author was able to sustain all that during his own rising prosperity. After the poverty of his youth, he readily adapted himself to the usual ways of the prosperous: buy an estate, travel the world, hobnob with the upper reaches of society, dump your wife in favor of an actress.

Some literary types love to denigrate Dickens for sentimentality. When Little Nell dies, they resist their own swelling throats. They deny their joy as Scrooge reforms and Pip triumphs. They stomp on their secret admiration for Dickens’ mild, virtuous young women. Such efforts are unnecessary for this Christmas Carol. It appeals less to raw emotion than do the words on the page. Instead, we are reeled in by the amazing power of Anderson to see. As Dickens himself, the actor talks to the audience directly. His seeing pierces the fourth wall. (Audience, when Anderson looks at you, you know you’ve been seen.) It bounces back and forth, creating other characters as well as the ghosts of Christmases past, present, and future. The many characters in this “reading” exist because the actor sees them. We so accept his solo performance that we wonder why, at one point, a fiddler briefly appears in the flesh.

Everyone loves a ghost story, and modern audiences feel at home with them. We crave the quick fix of magical solutions. You have only to look at our popular entertainments: stories of psychics, superheroes, witches, people who get regular messages from God, people who fly, disappear, expand, and melt. Dickens-haters fault him for unrealistic situations and exaggerated characters. Ha! We have always craved them. We long to leap over intelligence and patient work to land on the quick fix.

In A Christmas Carol, one may resist or admire the saintly responses of the town’s poor people to Scrooge’s verbal assaults. Here, Dickens’ poor are uniformly New Testament Christian, warm, courteous, unruffled in Scrooge’s presence. He attacks. They smile. Then as now, servility was required to preserve one’s minuscule life portion, even though a healthy blow to a Scroogic solar plexus might be more appropriate.

The printed page has the various sections labeled “Staves.” Though the story’s “carol” aspect has always eluded this writer, Jonathan Talbott relocates staves and puts some effective, self-effacing notes upon them. They attractively underline, or gently nudge the text. When the music fades under dialogue, Talbott seems to play the rests, deliberately orchestrating the non-music minutes that follow. Director Ted Pugh uses this very small space like a good choreographer. He stages Anderson in every square foot of it. The actor is crouching, rushing, sliding down a wall, hunching over a table, walking slowly in a bulging silence, or sitting serenely center stage in a creaky chair. Anderson’s various voices keep the characters clearly defined without undue exaggeration. (Among them are the watery sentences of Marley’s ghost, the bluster of a cigar-smoking businessman, the whipped cream of Scrooge’s young betrothed.) It is fun to watch social class, gender, and attitude take over Anderson’s body, especially, the slow evolution of Scrooge’s spine, over the course of fifty minutes, from arched rigidity to something more at ease in its skin.

Whatever literary complaints some may harbor about Dickens, the tale still teaches and moves us. It reminds us once again that generous, loving behavior is probably better than greed and exploitation.

Photographs by Dan Region