What the Dickens? Occupy protest inspires a new ‘Christmas Carol’

Reporting from San Francisco -- 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.

After all, everyone else has.

The slender novella was first popularized in the United States as a radio play during the Great Depression. In Dickens’ tale, the miserly Scrooge is visited on Christmas Eve by his dead business partner and the ghosts of Christmas past, present and future. He sees visions of his lonely childhood, the wasted promise of his young manhood and his eventual death — wealthy but unmourned — and vows to be a better, more generous man if only given a second chance.

Since then there have been all-black Christmas Carols and a western version hosted by Ronald Reagan. In Rod Serling’s iteration, Scrooge envisioned a nuclear Armageddon.

Yosemite Sam played the miser in “Bugs Bunny’s Christmas Carol.” Oscar the Grouch did a similar star turn. The tale has been squeezed into “The Six Million Dollar Man” and “The Odd Couple.” There have been Klingon adaptations and zombie versions, ballets, musicals, films and operas.

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But the idea for Sullivan’s production “is even better,” said Jonathan H. Grossman, associate professor of English at UCLA, because “it will speak right to Dickens’ main concern — the limitations inherent in modern capitalism — for a new time.”

That is, if it ever gets performed.

Sullivan’s dream is to stage a reading for a genuine Occupy audience. Unfortunately, ever since the playwright began trying to harness the classical tale for the modern protest movement, the police have moved faster than his muse.

The script is finished, and Sullivan is in the process of casting — not an easy task on short notice during the holidays, especially since Bob Cratchit has to play guitar and someone must be proficient on concertina.

And with Christmas coming, actual encampments are few and far between. Sullivan reached out to Oakland (shut down Oct. 25 and again on Nov. 14) and San Francisco (raided by authorities last week). On Wednesday, he got in touch with New York City’s Working Theater for a possible reading at Occupy Wall Street, the movement’s ground zero (dismantled before Thanksgiving).

He wanted to stage the show for Occupy members for many reasons, not the least of which was that hanging around in a drafty tent bearing witness to America’s income inequality can get a little boring. And no matter how open-minded the Mime Troupe’s audiences are, he said, “I’m sure a bunch of them have never been to an Occupy camp.”

The production also provided a way for the 51-year-old Sullivan, who embraced activism at a young age, to stand in solidarity with the Occupy protesters.

When he was 6 years old or so and living in Los Angeles, Sullivan said, he went with his parents to a protest against then-President Johnson. They brought their pet rabbit to show that they were a “peaceful family” — and ended up in a parking lot tree when they realized they couldn’t outrun the police officers in riot gear.

Through “A Christmas Carol,” Sullivan said, the Occupy protesters can see that they are “an important new part of the struggle. … I want to say this is a continuation of something, and, hopefully, maybe, we’ll win.”

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Sullivan is no Dickens novice. He has played Scrooge’s open-hearted nephew Fred, as well as the ghosts of Christmas past and future, in performances at San Francisco’s American Conservatory Theater.

There was one particular show that made him realize that he had to reclaim the classic.

During a performance more than a decade ago dedicated to raising money to help AIDS patients, Sullivan — decked out as a Dickens ghost with a little basket to hold donations — was mingling with audience members.

“I heard this woman say that she was so offended by the fact that we were asking for money after the show for these poor people, ‘especially after a show like this,’” Sullivan recounted. “It was just so horrifying to me that someone could sit through ‘A Christmas Carol’ and so not get it.”

First he thought about setting the Dickens classic in the Depression, maybe at a roadside camp somewhere between Oklahoma and Bakersfield, where characters like the Joad family from John Steinbeck’s “The Grapes of Wrath” might have congregated.

But when the Occupy movement began in September, everything clicked: A national movement about income inequality. A classical tale about income inequality. A theater troupe with a history of singing, dancing and skewering.

Anyone with a passing knowledge of Dickens’ story will have no trouble with Sullivan’s version, which actually is a play within a play: Members of a fictional Occupy camp stage “A Christmas Carol” for one another.

The ghost of Christmas past still reminds Scrooge of the man he was and the paths he, sadly, did not choose. The ghost of Christmas present underscores the hard lives of the 99% — and the miserly banker’s part in making them so. And the ghost of Christmas future still offers fear and the promise of redemption.

But the tale is leavened with labor songs, and the normally mild Bob Cratchit is an angry man. “People always think this story is about you,” he tells Scrooge. “Just you … the one evil man! And if you change — everything is different, the world is transformed.”

Then Cratchit delivers Sullivan’s message. It is an updated version of Dickens’ too:

“It ain’t you …it’s the idea of you that’s killin’ us,” Cratchit tells Scrooge. “It’s steppin’ over the hungry and homeless to buy [things] we don’t need that’s killin’ us. It’s lettin’ them turn our government into a casino that’s killin’ us! …

“It ain’t about you,” Cratchit says. “It’s about us.”

maria.laganga@latimes.com