Twisting Carol

Premiered at The Haverford School (Haverford, PA).

“This play has been the best middle school directing experience I’ve had! My drama students loved the characters you created and we had even more fun bringing them to life in front of one of the toughest audiences around – 7th & 8th graders. The audience really got into the play from the very beginning. Thanks!” – Steve Mann, Cassville Middle School (MO)

Synopsis

Ebenezer Scrooge, in need of a serious attitude adjustment, abuses his poor clerk Cratchit (who sits in a chair so short he can’t even be seen behind his desk), turns down his nephew Fred’s Christmas dinner invite, and suggests to a pair of philanthropists that the poor should go play in traffic. He’s so self-centered he hasn’t even noticed that his deceased partner Jacob Marley’s corpse is stuck on the roof and smells awful. That night, he is visited by Marley’s ghost—who believes he is the ghost of Bob Marley and has the dreadlocks to prove it—and warned that unless he changes his ways, Scrooge will have hair even longer than Marley’s own endless dreads. Marley leaves, and Scrooge is visited by three ghosts: an aerobics instructor, a guy named Bob, and a flasher. They take him on a tour of his Christmas past, present and future, showing him his youth as an apprentice, the Cratchit family’s rubber chicken Christmas dinner and their sickly child, Short Tim, and Scrooge’s end in an unmarked grave with vendors selling off his body parts. The Dickens scared out of him, Scrooge vows to change, and in the end makes amends.