This holiday season, The Provincetown Theater will present their production of Doris Baizley’s adaptation of Charles Dickens’ novella A Christmas Carol. The play is familiar to all of us and has been referenced, reproduced, and translated in various media over the nearly 180 years since it was written and still packs a punch, as well-worn as the story is. In 1977, Doriz Baizley wrote a version that featured a play within the play as a theater troupe faces constant struggles in their quest to put on a performance of the famous story. Baizley, who has also written plays such as Mrs. California, Tears of Rage, Guns, and Shiloh Rules, is also actively involved editing documentary scripts and in several community initiatives, including Loyola Marymount University’s Center for Reconciliation and Justice, and numerous group projects addressing social and economic justice topics through performance. She took some time to reflect on her now almost 50-year-old version of the Dickens classic and on the role of theater in our lives.
Provincetown Magazine: Are you familiar with the Provincetown Theater and have you been to Provincetown?
Doris Baizley: I haven’t been to Provincetown, but it’s legendary to me as the place where O’Neill and the Provincetown Players were developing new plays. Then I looked up the history of the Provincetown Theater and learned that a version of it started in the 60’s as a workshop or theater group, and that’s how I started so it felt familiar in some way. About Provincetown itself, I haven’t been but it’s also kind of legendary in my mind as the place where my friends love to go in the summer and send me beautiful pictures. I live in Venice Beach on the other corner of the US, so I think we are diagonally related!
PM: A Christmas Carol is a very old play but one that people keep coming back to every year. When you adapted it in 1977, what drew you to it and what was your goal, creatively?
DB: Yes, A Christmas Carol is a beautiful story that people seem to have loved since it was written – and when it’s done as a play it brings families into the theater to see it together which keeps it popular.
When we were asked to do it in 1977, I was part of a small theater company that worked within The Mark Taper Forum – LA’s regional theater, known for developing new political plays like The Trial of the Catonsville Nine and Zoot Suit. We were seven actors, a director, and a writer (me) called The Improvisational Theatre Project. We worked six days a week to come up with a short play every fall and spring to tour the LA schools. Gordon Davidson, the director of the Taper, asked if we could come up with an adaptation of A Christmas Carol to perform on the main stage, so of course we wanted to but…. we were young. There was nobody in our company old enough to play Scrooge or young enough to play Tiny Tim. I felt pretty stuck for a while and then I remember the moment it hit me – that it would be a play-within-a-play: a small theater company is stuck on opening night of A Christmas Carol without a Scrooge (quit) or a Tim (fired). Then I thought, oh, of course – there’s a mean stage manager and a prop boy who wants to become an actor, so they will be turned into our Scrooge and our Tiny Tim.
This idea fell right into place with my (and the company’s) creative goals. The players would be poor because working a lot with mime we didn’t use many props or costumes. The players had been travelling and telling this story for years, which fit our story-theater techniques and allowed me to keep the language of Dickens prose, which I love as much as his dialogue. They would be telling the story as they’re acting it.
Now that I think back, I realize that it’s the company that changes Scrooge. It’s the company that puts their stage manager into the role and into the story that will change him. I think that has a lot to do with where we were (where I was) with theater and politics in 1977. There was something about the power of the ensemble, the group. Our heroes were the Open Theater in NYC, the Mime Troupe in San Francisco, Paul Sills’ Story Theatre in Chicago. It wasn’t about becoming stars or career-building. It sounds naïve now, but I believe it was related to experiencing the political movements from the 60‘s: civil rights, anti-war – at that point in 1977 we felt we had achieved something. Sorry, gotta stop here. This doesn’t lead to a good place for a person of my age.
PM: The original is a dark play with a sociopolitical message at its core. How does your version differ in tone, and does it still carry that same message?
DB: OK. The sociopolitical message of A Christmas Carol. Yes! There’s very little an adapter has to invent because Dickens has done it all. You can’t enter his story without being in a world of terrifying levels of poverty and wealth. At the bottom are the workhouses, where poor people are actually punished for being poor. And the top level, the businessmen like Scrooge building their industries and banks. Christmas Present always takes Scrooge to see both: Fred’s happy party with a fat turkey and party games on one side – the poverty of the Cratchits on the other – and at the very bottom, the children of Ignorance and Want.
Although our physical life and appearance didn’t resemble a Victorian card, it was important to me to use the original language as much as possible.
And does this message last? Is it familiar today? I keep thinking of the description Marley gives of his associates’ ghosts: “the businessman chained to his safe, the corrupt government’s chained to each other.” So yes, here we are. What seemed so extreme about Scrooge seems real now.
PM: What drew you to playwriting in the first place, and how has your work changed and developed over the course of your long career?
DB: I always knew I was going to be a playwright. From fifth grade. I had a good friend, and we would turn any history lesson or reading lesson into an excuse for dressing up and playing parts. I wrote a play about Queen Elizabeth and Sir Walter Raleigh where he puts his cape over the mud puddle so that Queen Elizabeth can walk across it. That was scene one. In scene two, James I is now the King of England, and he doesn’t like Sir Walter Raleigh, so he has his head cut off. We used a basketball with a hat on it for his head. He wore a big shirt and held it up from inside the shirt. When the axe came down, the head rolled into the audience. It was a huge hit. We moved it from our fifth-grade classroom to the main auditorium.
But the first professional play that got me started was called Mary Dyer Hanged in Boston, about my ancestor who defied the governors of the Massachusetts Bay Colony to practice her Quaker beliefs and went to the gallows in 1660. The play was performed in New York in 1971 by an ensemble led by a member of the Open Theater.
My ensemble period lasted for a while and then at a certain point, it was really nice to sit alone in a room and write a play on my own. Plays like Mrs. California, Shiloh Rules, Tears of Rage. That’s been my career, not a famous one, but a satisfying one: getting to see them produced in different cities, sitting in a rehearsal room, I still like that. But recently, I got back, not to the ensemble so much, as plays that are community-based. If a theater or a community organization asked me to come and write a play about X, I would say yes. And it’s led to some interesting projects.
PM: You are also involved with documentary film story editing. How did you get involved with that, and why documentary as opposed to fiction?
DB: I was helping my friend Mary Lampson who edits documentary film – most recently Crip Camp. She was looking at a movie she was having trouble with, and she said let’s go back and look at the transcripts. Then my playwriting kicked in, and I sort of fell in love with transcripts as a kind of dialogue. Looking hard enough you can find emotion, character, action, conflict. I started seeing how I could structure a dramatic piece out of other people’s words. There is one doc I worked on that I’d like to mention because I think it’s my favorite and it has relevance for Cape Cod. It’s Anne Makepeace’s movie We Still Live Here – As Nutayunean about the Wampanaug tribe’s efforts to restore their language.
But I really love plays based on first person narratives. There are so many voices that are so much more interesting than the ones I can make up. And I want to get them on stage. Documentary theater. Anna Deavere Smith is my hero here.
PM: You have done a lot of work with communities outside the mainstream over the years. What role can theater play in terms of social justice?
DB: First of all – listening. I think the same skills that playwrights and actors use to invent character can bring the words of a real person to life on stage in a way that keeps them true and puts them into a new context that can communicate on many different levels. I don’t like the phrase “giving a voice to the voiceless” – for us it’s more like giving a stage to some powerful voices that we need to pay attention to.
A Christmas Carol by Doris Baizley will be performed at the Provincetown Theater, 238 Bradford St.,Thursdays – Saturdays, 7 p.m. and Sundays at 2 p.m., November 20 – December 7. For tickets ($57.80) and information call 508.487.7487 or visit provincetowntheater.org.
–Rebecca M. Alvin
