An Interview with Director Maryann Lombardi

Question: What attracted you to Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol?
Answer: I was attracted to A Christmas Carol because of the wide commercial draw of an event that is so recognizable and accessible, paired with my own aesthetic, which is not naturalistic in form. I’m constantly interested in material that is interesting to a broad audience of people of different age, gender and ethnicity and presenting them with work that is truly theatrical.

Q: What most interested you about the story of A Christmas Carol?
A: First and foremost, I was attracted to the character of Marley. In the original novel, he is the first thing we hear about, then he disappears from the story, and that left me wanting to know more about Marley. So my way in to the story was the question of what happened to Marley.

Q: There are so many existing stage adaptations of A Christmas Carol. Why did you feel the need to write a new one for this production?
A: In the five or six stage adaptations that I read, none of them focused on Marley specifically and I couldn’t get that out of my head. But also, all of the adaptations that I read were written and created for specific theaters, and I was uncertain about their suitability for our own Rand Theater. What kind of performance opportunities could I give the students when most of these adaptations that had about forty characters with mostly small roles? I thought it would be exciting to create an adaptation that was truly for our space as well as for the students that we serve.

Q: How did you come up with the idea of incorporating puppetry into your production?
A: Well, it actually stemmed from Marley again, because I had this visual picture of him having these chains that were literally attached to his body and that were controlled by other members of the cast. That image was a very early image that I had and it had a very strong puppet element. Then I was thinking about what was really theatrical on stage and what makes these spirits not human and unique, and that led me to the thought of how exciting it would be to use puppetry. Also, this whole production was written with the [UMass] theater department in mind, and having Miguel [Romero – Professor of Scenic Design and master puppeteer] here it was difficult to get off the subject of puppetry in my mind, and how exciting it would be for me to integrate his puppetry work into this production.

Q: What other images were you drawn to when creating A Christmas Carol?
A: The work of Julia Margaret Cameron, a Victorian photographer, was my first external visual resource. She was a resource less in regard to production design than in regard to text creation. While writing the characters I would keep coming back and looking at things through the eyes of these very theatrical representations of people at the time Dickens was writing. My focus was very much on the person rather than the icon, I was trying to figure out how I get my brain inside the person, rather than just saying what does Scrooge represent? So I would keep looking at a face depicted in this particular Julia Margaret Cameron photo that in my mind I cast as Scrooge, and try and see things through his eyes.

Q: Were you consciously trying to move away from the archetypes traditionally depicted in A Christmas Carol?
A: Yes, I was less concerned with the archetype of Scrooge than I was of the man – who he is as a person. Because there is something undeniable about Scrooge that we can all connect to and have connected to, and see in ourselves. I wanted to figure out who the man was that was supporting that archetype in an attempt to make him as approachable as possible. I wanted to actually care about the man’s journey, not necessarily the epic nature of A Christmas Carol as a whole, and us just leaving the theater with a good feeling. I wanted to connect to a man – two men in this case – and then those men’s journeys expanding to include us all. But first I wanted to care about Scrooge and I wanted to care about Marley as people, not just as symbols.

Q: How is the story of Scrooge’s redemption affected by seeing him as a man rather than an archetype?
A: The two iconic images for me in the production as well as the text were firstly when Marley pushes Scrooge out of his chamber window and pretty much pushes him into the lap of the Ghost of Christmas Past, and then the image at the end of the Ghost of Christmas Future, when the body, (which is in essence himself), drags Scrooge into his own grave. What’s nice about these two images is that, when Marley pushes Scrooge out of the window Scrooge is holding onto the balcony but cannot save himself, cannot pull himself back into his home, he falls. Whereas in that final image he is in that same situation, where he’s holding on for dear life, and again there is noone there to help him, but he is able to pull himself back up and save himself. I liked that in this story Scrooge has to do the work for himself. The spirit world and his community and everyone in this story does an enormous amount to get him to this point where he has to make a choice. And so I was very interested in imagery that showed him having to choose, him having to make effort. I didn’t want Scrooge to just sit around and just watch all this stuff happen around him and have some sort of forced epiphany. I wanted to make sure that he physically had to do something to choose to live. 

POST SHOW DISCUSSION QUESTIONS
How did the fact that seven chorus members played all the roles except Scrooge and Marley affect the telling of the story? What part does light play in the production? Which parts of the production were particularly well lit and warm and which were more cold and dimly lit? Were there any characters who had a particular relationship to light? What, in your opinion, is the moral that audience members should take away from A Christmas Carol?