This month and next, Santa Cruz Shakespeare will present A Christmas Carol at the Santa Cruz County Veteran’s Memorial Building. The production is the start of what organizers hope will be a yearly holiday production by the local Shakespeare troupe.
The production is also a collaboration between Santa Cruz Shakespeare and the Dickens Project. Project co-director Renee Fox is serving as dramaturg, along with UCSC Performance, Play, and Design Department faculty member Michael Chemers, and her input will, she says, give audiences “a more expansive understanding of Dickens’s biography and cultural references, including the centrality of Carol to his public reading tours, his lifelong obsession with theater, and the ways he capitalized on—but didn’t really invent—the celebrations of Victorian Christmas that we associate with Carol.”
The story was adapted by Charles Pasternak, Shakespeare Santa Cruz artistic director as well as the play’s director, who has necessarily abridged the tale for length, but, Fox says, has come up with a script that “is taken almost entirely from the language of Dickens’s novella.” The play has multiple narrators who are also characters, and this, she says, preserves Dickens’s “luxurious language” and “rich descriptions,” as well as reminding audiences that “this is a story about the pleasures of entanglement: about the ways different people, moments, and experiences intersect and shape each other, and about the joy and ethical value of recognizing and empathizing with all the varied people whose paths cross ours.”
One of Pasternek's few changes, Fox says, was to cast women as all three ghosts. This change is “a fantastic intervention in a novella whose few women characters are just bit players around the edges of the story about a man’s transformation,” she says. “In this production, women have the power, vision, and compassion that Dickens doesn’t give them in the original text.”
Christmas Carol: Dramaturgy Talk
A Dickensian Deep Dive with dramaturgs Dr. Renée Fox and Dr. Michael Chemers on Santa Cruz Shakespeare's upcoming production of Dickens's A Christmas Carol.
Date & Time: Thursday, November 21st, 2024, 5:30 - 6:30 PM
Location: Santa Cruz Public Library, Downtown Branch
Dr. Fox and Dr. Chemers have also compiled an impressive site of information on the topic available here.
Fox also feels she has been able to bring to the forefront some aspects that, she feels, “often get lost in adaptations.” These include “the sensory profusion of Dickens’s language, the ways in which his careful metaphors carry political weight, the emphasis—in both text and illustrations—on the kinds of suffering the characters are and aren’t willing to see, and Scrooge’s transformation across the novella from a solitary individual to an integral part of a dynamic, complicated, abundant world.” She adds that she’s had to set aside her interest in the novella’s “darkly gothic aspects—ghosts and graveyards, isolation and loss, the monsters we make of the miseries around us,” and to focus on how the text “invites us all to feel deeply with one another,” especially in its communal theater setting.
Plans are also in place for an ongoing collaboration between Santa Cruz Shakespeare and the Dickens Project. “As two longstanding Santa Cruz organizations focused on building communities through shared love for British literature,” Fox says, “it feels like it’s time that we find rich and exciting ways to collaborate with each other.” Toward that end, Fox envisions future Christmas productions of Carol, in addition to developing joint educational programming (see accompanying story about the work being done by intern Molly Bingham).
Also on the drawing board are ideas for shared programming between the summer Dickens Universe and Santa Cruz Shakespeare’s summer schedule. Future discussions and reading groups are also planned throughout the year that will be of interest to both Shakespeare and Dickens fans.
Event Details:
- A Christmas Carol runs from November 23 to December 24 at the Santa Cruz County Veteran's Memorial Building, 846 Front Street in Santa Cruz.
- Tickets for both matinee and evening performances are now available at santacruzshakespeare.org and through the box office, 831-460-6399.
- Santa Cruz Shakespeare is offering all Dickens Universe participants 15% off on classic and groundling seats; enter the promotion code Dickens24 when you book tickets via website, or mention it if you book by phone.
