"I think we're coming into a time when we need to rethink everything—the way we relate to each other, and the way we bring people together."
That's Linda McInerney, director of a new production of that old favorite, A Christmas Carol, which premieres at Northampton's Academy of Music this weekend. She describes the endeavor as "community-based, community-engaged." It's also community-located, set not in foggy London but in a snowy Victorian Pioneer Valley.
McInerney has been staging thoughtful, small-scale plays in Old Deerfield Village for two decades, and recently at the Academy of Music as well. This Christmas Carol fulfills a dream she's had for some time—to create a big show, one that brings together lots of the people she's worked with over the years. She says the idea for this piece arrived by serendipity last year, backstage at the Academy. "One of the stagehands there sidled up to me, and she said, 'I've got two words for you, McInerney: Christmas Carol.' And I thought, 'That's what it has to be. Everyone loves it, I can put everybody in it, and I can build a community-oriented project.'"
Despite its title, A Christmas Carol isn't really about the Christian holiday. It's about the nondenominational "Christmas spirit" that Charles Dickens did more than anyone to create—"the only time in the long calendar of the year," as one of his characters says, "when men and women seem by one consent to open their shut-up hearts freely, and to think of other people as fellow-passengers to the grave, and not another race of creatures bound on other journeys."
"You can feel Dickens' intention," McInerney says. "It's pure and strong and it radiates through the story. You can tell that he wanted, not to take the Christ out of Christmas, but to really get into the humanity of it, to make it a story for all of us and really get at the core of the human spirit and how we seek interconnectedness and redemption." This all-inclusive impulse, of course, also captures the hybrid nature of Christmas, a conflation of the Gospel nativity story with Middle Eastern mythology, Nordic winter festivals and pagan solstice rituals.
McInerney's new adaptation of Dickens' ghost story draws liberally on his original dialogue to tell the evergreen story of "a squeezing, wrenching, grasping, scraping, clutching, covetous old sinner" visited by three spirits who show him the past he's forgotten, the present he's ignoring and the future in store if he doesn't change. As ever, Dickens humanized and personalized his message, creating Scrooge's overworked, underpaid clerk, Bob Cratchit, his impoverished family and his sickly child, Tiny Tim. A Christmas Carol, with its personifications of Want and Ignorance that accompany the Spirit of Christmas Present, came out of the same outrage at the condition of the poor in early Victorian London that inspired Oliver Twist, but with a Pickwickian slant. It's not a grim slice of life but a hearty, festive dream-journey.
The spirit of neighborly fellow-feeling that pervades the piece is why McInerney has lifted her Christmas Carol out of Dickensian London and plopped it down in our own Valley. The setting comes from Ashfield-based artist Amy Johnquest, fulfilling her own longtime community-based dream: to create an old-timey theatrical drop curtain at the Academy that would be a portrait of the Valley scene. The 40-foot backdrop Johnquest painted for this production is a composite cityscape, a medley of familiar building facades from Northampton, Springfield, Amherst and Greenfield.
The backdrop isn't the only local touch. There's also a little joke woven into the performance. When the Spirit of Christmas Past takes Scrooge back to revisit his happy boyhood, the familiar faces he points out will be unsuspecting locals sitting in the audience.
The cast, 31 strong, is headed by Michael Haley, a UMass alumnus who has had a four-decade career in Hollywood and returns to the stage, having recently semi-retired to a piece of land he bought in Conway years ago. From a rehearsal I visited last week, his Scrooge is a gruff, snappish fellow, more a choleric old curmudgeon than the typical icy loner. Haley is joined onstage by numerous veterans of McInerney's Deerfield productions and other Valley stages, a troupe of local children and three musicians, Bob and Emma Snope and Christopher Ishii, who accompany the traditional carols that thread through the action.
McInerney started planning this production over a year ago, and has seen it take on added relevance in recent months. "Who knew that the economic meltdown would happen, and we would all have to really take pause in the way we live our lives in this country and think through what's important in a new way," she muses. "It makes us think about how we want to spend the holidays. Maybe we want to live differently, and be differently with one another, sharing a human experience with our loved ones and family, rather than buying another iPod. That's what the message of this piece is about."
A Christmas Carol: Dec. 18-20 at 8 p.m. and 20-21 at 2 p.m., Academy of Music, 274 Main St., Northampton, (413) 582-1332, cabotix.com.
