Two Crows Theatre Offers a New Way to Get Your Dickens Fix at the Holidays
Photo by Maureen Janson Heintz.
In the first moments of Two Crows Theatre’s world premiere, A Christmas Haunting, it’s clear that Dr. Katherine Redlaw does not like Christmas. There’s the unceasing seasonal carols on every radio station, she tells us wearily. There’s the garish decorations and ornaments that assault the eyes, hiding something, probably. There’s the inevitable urge to measure yourself against those happy folks who genuinely have something to celebrate at Christmastime and realizing all the ways your own life comes up short. And there’s the ever compounding feeling of misery and remorse — another year past and nothing to show for it but disappointment. If only, Dr. Redlaw pleads, she could get out from under this crushing feeling of failure, particularly at this dark time of year.
That’s when the ghost shows up.
A Christmas Haunting is Colleen Madden’s original adaptation of the Charles Dickens novella, The Haunted Man and the Ghost’s Bargain, playing at Slowpoke Lounge & Cabaret in Spring Green through December 22. It’s based on the fifth and last of Dickens’s seasonal ghost stories, which was written in the mid-nineteenth century — a time when telling spooky stories around a fire was a common Christmas pastime. And like the first in the series, A Christmas Carol, it’s a story of redemption, where the protagonist recognizes their misplaced priorities and resolves to be more kind, more appreciative of their own good fortune, more empathetic toward others, and more present in their own lives.
But only after a ghost scares the heck out of them.
To bring this forgotten Dickens story to life, Madden has updated it to present day and changed the male main character, a chemist, to a female researcher and academic specializing in mirror physics and string theory. In great demand all over the world, she gives lectures, she writes books. She even has her own podcast and Netflix series. (“Why should Neil Degrasse Tyson have all the fun?” she asks us cynically.) But her personal losses overwhelm any sense of pride or satisfaction from her wildly successful career. Growing up with an alcoholic father and an emotionally distant mother, she found love and comfort in her sister and husband once. They are gone now too — replaced by more focus on her work — but haunting her still.
And then there’s the ghost.
The first half of Madden’s one-woman show feels like a creepy web of knots being loosened slowly by a terrified but trustworthy narrator. Home for the first time in decades, and scheduled to give a talk at her alma mater in New England, Madden’s Dr. Redlaw searches the audience desperately for assurances that she’s not crazy. “Do you believe in ghosts?” she asks plaintively. You see, there’s a ghost who has been following her around. All over the world. The faceless spectre shows up at conferences, at talks, at bars. And now the ghost has followed her home, to an inn in the middle of a blizzard that has paralyzed the city. And she has the feeling that a confrontation — a reckoning — will occur soon.
Photo by Maureen Janson Heintz.
To illustrate this story, Madden morphs from the serious, if shaken, scholar to a chatty British jack of all trades, to his wife Millie, a tender woman filled with “gentle insipid femininity,” to Millie’s failing 87 year-old father-in-law, to an asthmatic college student staying at the inn for the holidays. She even takes on the genuinely frightening shape of the ghost, appearing to float above the scared group of mortals at the hotel. Without the help of additional costume pieces or physical props, Madden assumes voices, gestures, gaits and impeccably mimed objects to create a distinct age and attitude for each of these diverse characters, literally transforming with a twirl. Practical sound effects surround the audience as mysterious banging on windows and doors seems to come from all sides and a few special lighting and microphone tricks make the ghost even more other-worldly.
And as for that bargain, the spirit offers simply to take away Katherine’s pain and sorrow by erasing her memory of any bad or hurtful event. And in the first moments of her transformation, it’s hard not to feel jealous of the trade. The professor says she feels light, taller. Her jaw unclenches, her back is relaxed, she is as unburdened as a child and able to breathe joyfully, freely, for the first time in decades. But as she and the other characters learn, without sadness one cannot truly appreciate happiness. Without painful memories, all learning from the past disappears, and empathy for others is impossible. Understanding the value of emotions on opposite ends of the spectrum, our heroine eventually realizes that she cannot — and should not try to — escape from past hardships that have shaped who she is now.
Photo by Maureen Janson Heintz.
Madden is a whirlwind in the 75-minute show, using every inch the thrust space well, her writing filling it with distinct details that her physicalizations and storytelling make vivid in the mind’s eye. Under Marcus Truschinski’s direction the play feels pleasantly balanced and tailored for modern audiences, offering a more introspective take on the importance of accessing and sharing “tidings of comfort and joy,” even when they compete with our own darker feelings.
The script shows that Madden is no stranger to Dickens adaptations — her witty version of A Christmas Carol has been used for Children’s Theater of Madison annual production for years. For Haunting she adds in some self referential Dickens remarks, sets the scene at “Bleak Hall,” and manages to invent a good reason for a traditional English family to welcome her back to her American hometown. The adaptation also draws out parallels with the author’s other work, such as suggesting that the ghostly visions might be the result of indigestion, featuring down-on-their-luck folks determined to see the bright side of their lot, and choosing Christmastime to dwell on memories of lost love, lost children, and lost siblings. (Dickens himself had just lost his sister shortly before writing this piece.) Finally there’s a sickly young man who will not flourish unless the main character experiences a change of heart. Like discovering ornaments from one’s youth to hang on a new Christmas tree, these echoes are all the more interesting for their rearranging.
Not as melodramatic as A Christmas Carol or the film classic It’s a Wonderful Life, not as saccharine or as forced into a tidy happy endings as holiday TV specials, A Christmas Haunting offers lessons without lectures and warmth without over-worn tropes or tacky special effects. In this season of wish lists, it’s a lovely cautionary tale, beautifully told, about the perils of getting exactly what you ask for.