Ebenezer Scrooge goes to court at Bristol Riverside Theatre.
By: Jessica Loughery
About a year or less after 9/11, playwright Mark Brown says he found himself longing for those few weeks after 9/11, but without all the pain and horror. "The outpouring of generosity and humanity was the best I’ve ever seen in my life," he says. "Worldwide, people were coming together. Nobody was honking at anyone. People opened doors for each other. People were calling family members. I wanted to find a way to say we should be that way all year round and not wait for catastrophes."
What came to him was writing a sequel to Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol. He had considered doing an adaptation of the beloved holiday tale a few years before, and now found inspiration for a slightly different story. "I went back with that (idea) in mind and it became sort of a full-fledged sequel with a different ending," Mr. Brown says.
The Trial of Ebenezer Scrooge will run just in time for the holidays, Nov. 14 to Dec. 10, at Bristol Riverside Theatre. The comedy, which is entirely set in a courtroom, has Scrooge bringing charges against the ghosts who sought to change his outlook the year before. David Howey stars as Scrooge, Judge Stanchfield R. Pearson is played by Douglas Campbell and Ezra Barnes is Solomon Rothschild, the defense attorney. Scrooge represents himself on the prosecuting side.
You may remember the work of Mr. Brown, a Woodbury native, from earlier in the fall. He’s the man behind the adaptation of Around the World in 80 Days that opened BRT’s season in October. He’s also co-written a one-man play titled Poe: Into That Darkness Peering, and written an adaptation of The Little Prince, as well as a play called Try Not the Whole Enchilada. Most of these works have premiered and been through workshops at the Orlando-University of Central Florida Shakespeare Festival in Florida, including The Trial. "I have a really good relationship with them," Mr. Brown says.
Before he started writing, Mr. Brown was a stage actor, performing at such venues as McCarter Theater in Princeton, where he once acted in A Christmas Carol. He jokes that he’d done that show so many times at different theaters that he made it a goal to play every character.
From New Jersey, Mr. Brown moved to Chicago and then Florida, then perceived as an up-and-coming destination for actors, he says. "It was being talked about as the next Hollywood, but that really never happened," he says. "There were some things that were happening and then it just sorta stopped."
One good thing came out of the time Mr. Brown had on his hands between productions: he started working on his playwriting. "I’ve always enjoyed writing," he says. "I just focused so much on acting that I really wasn’t following that dream and then I just started doing it between shows."
Now a husband, father and soon-to-be New Yorker (he and the family are in the middle of a move from L.A. to the Big Apple), Mr. Brown plans to focus on writing. "In the beginning, I was writing when I wasn’t acting. Now that the writing is going so well I’ve pretty much given up acting. It’s the illusion of having more control over your career," he says with a laugh.
Around the time he started seriously writing is when Mr. Brown stumbled on an old copy of A Christmas Carol. "I picked it up one day and it just started reading like court transcripts," he says. "At first I thought that might be a fun adaptation, (but I) didn’t want to do yet another adaptation."
So he put it back down, only to revisit the project after 9/11 rekindled his idea with a vision of kindness the whole year through. That’s when he started working on a courtroom sequel, which he says the director of the Orlando production joked is "more Judge Judy than English jurisprudence."
Witnesses include all four ghosts… well, almost. The Ghost of Christmas Present is scheduled but never actually ever takes the stand, the idea being that Christmas Present is never present. Mr. Brown says the Ghost of Christmas Past, played by Sarah Hankins (returning after playing the role in Orlando), is "female (and) not a child but with childlike qualities."
Mr. Brown’s favorite to write was the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come, played by Foster Cronin. "To me he’s Woody Allen in a shroud," he says. "He’s hot, he’s cold, he’s very, very nervous and he’s always complaining." The nervousness comes through in body language, as well as the words of the Ghost Translator (played by Jo Twiss) that Christmas Yet to Come is provided with; he can’t speak, of course.
"It’s really its own sort of world," Mr. Brown says when asked if he wrote the play with any specific Christmas Carol characters of the past in mind. He does admit to holding a preference for the 1984 George C. Scott made-for-television version, as well as Albert Finney’s 1970 musical Scrooge. He’s also quite familiar with the song "One More Sleep Till Christmas," which came out of the 1992 film The Muppet Christmas Carol. He jokes that he likes to substitute Christmas with other fun happenings, as in "There’s only one more sleep ’til Las Vegas."
Coming from such a well-known family story, the play will have different associations for different audience members, depending on which generation of versions you come from. It also boasts a variety of humor, which Mr. Brown hopes will speak to all ages. "Kids will get stuff on one level and parents on another," he says, "but the humor is not so adult that you’re putting your hands over kids’ ears."
And you wouldn’t want to either. This is a classic tale with a classic holiday moral that warms the heart as much as any Nutcracker performance or "Peanuts" Christmas special. "I’ve heard people tell me you get the story of A Christmas Carol through different windows, yet it’s a sequel," Mr. Brown says. The moral of Charles Dickens’ classic is definitely present, but there’s also more there.
After his initial inspiration, Mr. Brown says his challenge was, "How do I get across, without being too didactic, (the idea) that the spirit of caring and generosity (should last) year round?" Without giving away the ending, let’s just say that he settled on showing the audience, and the characters who once sought to teach Scrooge a lesson, that the Christmas spirit means more than a yearly holiday visit. The original Christmas Carol message of holding up the Christmas spirit is extended to say, hold it up Christmas Day and every day.
The Trial of Ebenezer Scrooge will be staged at Bristol Riverside Theatre,
120 Radcliffe St., Bristol, Pa., Nov. 14-Dec. 10. Performances: Tues.-Fri. 8 p.m.;
Sat. 2, 8 p.m., Sun. 3 p.m. Tickets cost $34-$37, $29 preview performances. For
information, call (215) 785-0100. On the Web: www.brtstage.org