Because when you think about Christmas, who doesn’t think of militant class warfare?
(LA Times) — Ebenezer Scrooge is a corporate banker, busy foreclosing on the hapless masses. Bob Cratchit and his beleaguered family live in a chilly tent in an anonymous Occupy encampment. The ghost of Christmas future sports a flowing black robe of taped-together trash bags and plastic sheeting. Tiny Tim dies.
At least that’s how the San Francisco Mime Troupe’s resident playwright, Michael Gene Sullivan, has re-imagined “A Christmas Carol” for the troubled 21st century.
Truth be told, it wasn’t much of a stretch to place Charles Dickens’ Victorian classic into today’s Occupy world. And that, as Sullivan would be the first to tell you, is exactly the point. Dickens’ novella was written in the heart of the “Hungry ’40s,” a time of labor unrest, unemployment and starvation across 19th century Europe. The gap between rich and poor was wide — and getting ever wider.
The Cratchits as depicted by Dickens “are an example of where most people actually are today,” said Sullivan, who has spent the last 23 years with the Tony Award-winning theater group, which specializes in political satire and annoying the powerful.
As the 200th anniversary of Dickens’ birth approaches in February, “A Christmas Carol” has become “the closest thing to a modern myth that we have,” said John O. Jordan, a professor of literature at UC Santa Cruz.
So it seems perfectly natural that a group like the San Francisco Mime Troupe (mime as in mimic, not pantomime) would want to adapt what Jordan called Dickens’ “radical political statement,” albeit one that’s tied up in Christmas ribbon.