Ghost of a good tale
Jacob Marley takes his rightful place at center stage in the Actor’s Repertory Theatre’s new Christmas play, “Jacob Marley’s Christmas Carol,” which opens Friday. Patrick Treadway, one of Spokane’s best-known actors, plays Marley in this comic, family-friendly reworking of the Dickens tale by Tom Mula. It’s billed as an “evening of hilarity, redemption and renewal.” The question is not: Why tell the story from Marley’s viewpoint? The question is: Why didn’t anybody think of this before?
The fact is, Marley has never received his proper due. While Ebenezer Scrooge and Tiny Tim became household names, most people have trouble remembering exactly who Marley was. (Hint: He was Scrooge’s old business partner.)
Yet Marley is one of the most essential – and intriguing – characters in the original Charles Dickens story.
Dickens begins the story with the old man’s name and his unfortunate condition: “Marley was dead: to begin with. There is no doubt whatever about that. … Old Marley was dead as a doornail.”
The entire first chapter (titled “Marley’s Ghost”) revolves around the departed Marley. That’s because Marley’s ghost, chained and shackled, appears in Scrooge’s room and warns Scrooge, in the strongest terms possible, not to end up like him. In other words, not to end up a restless, unquiet soul in search of a happiness he spurned in life
Scrooge expresses astonishment that Marley’s soul is tortured; after all, wasn’t Marley an excellent businessman?
To which Marley replies that his “business” should have been something bigger than making money. It should have been “the common welfare.” It should have been “charity, mercy, forbearance and benevolence.”
As Marley’s ghost leaves he warns Scrooge that the same fate awaits him if he doesn’t open his soul to his fellow man. Otherwise Scrooge’s soul is “doomed to wander through the world – Oh woe is me! – and witness what it cannot share, but might have shared on earth, and turned to happiness.”
Gulp.
So Marley is a tragic character, in that he learned all of this too late. On the other hand, he is the story’s hero, since it was he who saves Scrooge from the same fate.
Playwright Mula said he got the idea after playing Scrooge in Chicago’s Goodman Theatre. A 10-year-old in the audience commented: “Jacob Marley got a raw deal.”
Mula thought about that, and agreed. So he set about to right this injustice. He originally wrote the story in book form and it became a hot seller.
In the introduction to the book, he wrote: ” ‘Christmas Carol’ will remain pristine, unbesmirched by my muddy little footprints. But, hopefully, there will be one less sad old ghost clanking about through eternity.”
He later adapted it for the stage and it has become an annual holiday tradition in a number of cities. It has been broadcast nationally by National Public Radio for the past seven years.
This ARt production is directed by co-founder Michael Weaver. The cast includes Treadway as Marley, David Seitz as Scrooge, Ron Ford as the Record Keeper and Carolyn Crabtree as the Bogle (an imp who torments Marley).