Mix Dickens with Dante, then sprinkle in some offbeat celestial humor à la “Good Omens,” and you’ll get something like “Jacob Marley’s Christmas Carol.” Written by Tom Mula, this solo play follows the travails of Ebenezer Scrooge’s late business partner as he navigates the afterlife, which involves a surprising amount of paperwork. Now onstage at Lifeline Theatre, this minimalist production blends the snarky, the sweet and the supernatural.
Solo retellings of classics are in vogue across the Anglophone theater world (see Andrew Scott’s “Vanya,” Eddie Izzard’s “Hamlet” and Sarah Snook’s “The Picture of Dorian Gray”), and I’ve grown somewhat skeptical of this genre’s dramatic value. No matter how well done, such adaptations often seem intended to showcase the star’s acting prowess rather than shed new light on an old story.
Happily, that’s not the case with this production, in which Lifeline ensemble member Phil Timberlake reprises the 19 roles that earned him a Jeff Award nomination last season. To be sure, Timberlake impresses with his range of dialects, facial expressions and physicality as he nimbly hops between characters, but this feat never feels self-indulgent. Rather, the simple staging evokes the Victorian oral tradition of telling ghost stories at the holidays, a prime example being Dickens’ own public readings of “A Christmas Carol.” Plus, Mula’s script offers enough idiosyncrasies and plot twists to be engaging on its own merit, even if built on familiar scaffolding.
Given that Mula first wrote this story as a novella (published in 1995 by Adams Media) and NPR later broadcast an audio version, it makes sense that the stage adaptation, which premiered at the Goodman Theatre in 1998, relies more on language than visuals. With plenty of evocative descriptions in the dialogue, this production requires a vivid imagination from audience members — a refreshingly analog, aural experience in our digital-oriented, image-saturated world. Indeed, the only credited designer is production manager and lighting designer Diane Fairchild, whose effects range from soft starlight to ghastly greens.
When Marley awakens in the afterlife, he encounters a setting that’s oddly familiar to the former moneylender: a dreary counting house, where a decrepit record keeper informs the dead man that he’s deep underwater on the contract he was meant to fulfill in life. Readers of Dickens’ novella may recall that Marley’s ghost despairingly declares that, in life, “Mankind was my business,” a realization that comes too late for him. Mula takes this metaphor to its logical end, envisioning a comedically bureaucratic purgatory and hell in which Marley is given one last chance to redeem his own soul: before the next daybreak, he must effect a sincere change of heart in Scrooge.
With the companionship of an impish spirit, who prefers the archaic moniker of “bogle,” Marley sets out on this seemingly impossible task. When an initial visit to Scrooge in his own ghostly guise doesn’t do the trick, Marley returns in the form of a Cockney boy and claims to be the Ghost of Christmas Past. That’s right: in this play, ghosts can shapeshift, and Marley is present, in some way or another, with each of Scrooge’s otherworldly guests.
Mula clearly tries not to rehash too many scenes of Christmases past, present and future from the original, and one of his more creative solutions is to take Marley on a journey through his own past while Scrooge is separately engulfed in his respective memories. The plot meanders and the pace lags a bit in the second act, but the Bogle’s sassy commentary and the fast-approaching dawn ultimately keep Marley on track.
While Mula leans into Dickens’ supernatural elements and retains his wholesome themes, his world-building is altogether more fantastical and whimsical. There’s a delightfully folkloric quality to the Bogle and the universe he inhabits that reminds me of Susanna Clarke’s “Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell” or Oliver Darkshire’s “Isabella Nagg and the Pot of Basil,” one of my favorite fantasy novels of the past year. I could almost swear that Mula, a longtime Chicago artist who starred as the Goodman’s Scrooge in the 1990s, moonlights as a British fantasy author.
All this to say: tonally, “Jacob Marley’s Christmas Carol” was a pleasant surprise to me, and it’s a clever twist on a well-trod story. I suspect the show would benefit from a shorter runtime with no intermission, but nevertheless, what Mula and Timberlake achieve here is quite charming.
Emily McClanathan is a freelance critic.
Review: “Jacob Marley’s Christmas Carol” (3 stars)
When: Through Dec. 21
Where: Lifeline Theatre, 6912 N Glenwood Ave
Running time: 1 hour, 55 minutes
Tickets: $45 at lifelinetheatre.com
