Brandon Scott, Keri Safran and Rob Welsh (Photo by Elizabeth Schmidt)
Reviewed by G. Bruce Smith
The Ebell of Los Angeles
Through Dec. 14
RECOMMENDED
With productions of A Christmas Carol ubiquitous on stages every holiday season throughout the United States, it’s delightful to see a droll imagined take on the origin of Charles Dickens’ classic.
The three-hander, written by Matt Schatz and produced by the site-specific and immersive company InHouse Theatre, is inventive, playful and just plain fun.
Fred (Brandon Scott), a young entrepreneur in Victorian London, sets out to soften his uncle Ebenezer Scrooge’s hardened heart, and decides the best way to accomplish this is by having a play done that will turn Scrooge into a better person. He turns to a no-nonsense theatre producer, J.B. Roth (Keri Safran), who in turn seeks out a broke and philandering Dickens (Rob Welsh). We learn later in the play that Fred might have ulterior motives for his unlikely mission.
In Schatz’s imagining of the birth of Christmas Carol, Dickens comes across as something of a befuddled absent-minded professor. Roth, the only female theatrical producer operating in 1800s England, thinks the author is a bit of a fool but she respects him as a writer.
“Writers, when they write, say something. But when they speak they say nothing,” she quips in what is one of many funny lines in the play — most of them delivered by Roth.
Roth also knows Dickens is impoverished and likely willing to take any job. A Jew, she also calls him out for his anti-Semitism (think Fagin in Oliver Twist).
“If I’m an amoral woman, it’s not because I’m a Jew, it’s because I’m in the theater,” she deadpans.
The three then collaborate to come up with a plot. Dickens visits both the home of Scrooge, who roughs him up, and the home of Scrooge’s clerk Bob Cratchit, who has many children but whose child Tiny Tim is actually a very tall boy. A decision is made to make Tiny Tim the sickly child in the play.
“Everyone loves a dying child,” Roth says. Dickens suggests that the actor who plays Tiny Tim can be starved before performances begin, to which Roth replies wryly, “Or we can use makeup.”
As the play begins to take shape, Scrooge’s repeatedly uttered expression “Bum fog” transforms into “Bah humbug.” There are a couple of small plot complications but nothing terribly notable. And a couple of subplots go nowhere.
The cast is superb, each inhabiting their respective characters fully — the earnest Scott as Fred, the wry Safran as Roth, and the bumbling Rob Welsh as Dickens. Alexis Carrie’s costumes added to the authenticity of the show.
The performance I saw was in a former factory, complete with exposed brick and windows that look out onto a nondescript industrial area on the fringes of downtown Los Angeles. With rows of chairs facing each other, and the stage action happening between those rows, the space felt intimate and successfully site-specific — you could imagine it as a backstage area/office space for Roth. However, the production (through Thursday) has now moved to a library at The Ebell of Los Angeles.
Although it might be challenging to identify a theme for The Past (possibly redemption?), it doesn’t much matter because the play is such a delectable holiday treat that you’d have to be a Scrooge not to find joy in it.
The Ebell of Los Angeles, 743 S. Lucerne Blvd., Los Angeles; Mon.-Thurs., 7:30 pm. thru Dec. 14. InHouseTheatre.org. Running time: 90 minute with no intermission.
