Oh, boo hoo, poor little One-Percenter. But what do we really know about Ebenezer Scrooge?
“He’s this mean, miserly, nasty old man,” said Stephan “Cash” Henry. “The thing that always bothered me was, we get to this point where we kind of like Scrooge, he has kind of turned himself around. But how did he become like this? How did Scrooge become Scrooge?”
Henry, 49, a veteran actor who has been teaching English and directing drama at Battle Ground High School for six years, loves the Charles Dickens holiday classic “A Christmas Carol,” but got frustrated when hunting for a stage adaptation that didn’t feel too familiar. He was hungry to understand antihero Scrooge better than Dickens really permits the audience to, so he joined a current literary trend by creating his own version and filling in the backstory.
This meant researching Dickens’ traumatized young life. The Dickens family was forced into debtors’ prison for the debts of their father, John; at age 12, Charles was working 10-hours days in a factory to help free them.
“He described it like working in hell,” Henry said.
Dickens had two siblings who died in childhood, a sister-in-law who died in his arms and a sickly, disabled nephew. He fell in love with a girl whose parents broke up the romance “because he wasn’t good enough for her,” Henry said.
“All in all, he was forced to live a life he didn’t want to live. He had no control over it,” Henry said.
All of this became a morality play about the bitter, disdainful Scrooge, “who pulled himself up by his own bootstraps and thinks everybody should be able to do that,” Henry said.
Scrooge’s heart is broken by the girl who fears he’ll always love money more. Tiny Tim’s malady is never named in the story, but the point hammered home by Dickens is that it’s treatable for a family with means — whereas Scrooge’s greed may well cost the child his life. (Dickens’ sister and her son both succumbed to disease a few years after “A Christmas Carol” was published in 1843.)
“There are all these real-life connections to Dickens’ life that he put in the story,” Henry said, and these are the episodes that he fleshed out in his new version of “A Christmas Carol.”
He wrote draft after draft over the summer, then took his script to his students and let them tear into it this fall.
“They have really helped to define it and refine it,” Henry said. “Some lines I thought sounded really great, when it came out of a kid’s mouth, maybe it was not right or awkward. So I said, ‘OK, let’s work together to retain the content and intention of the line but make it more natural.’ ”
The results of all of this creativity, adaptation and collaboration will debut next week at Battle Ground High School. Performances of “A Christmas Carol” are set for 7 p.m. Nov. 12-14 and Nov. 19-21 in the Lair at BGHS, 300 W. Main St. in Battle Ground Tickets are available at payments.battlegroundps.org; they’re $5 for seniors and students with an ASB card and $7 for general admission.
“I wanted to show Scrooge, and why I think he deserves to be loved,” Henry said.
Come see if you can learn to love the old hater.
Bits ‘n’ Pieces appears Fridays and Saturdays. If you have a story you’d like to share, email bits@columbian.com.
