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Lone Jack, MO -- Quite dapper in a Victorian frock coat, period chalk-strip trousers and a black top hat, Gerald Charles Dickens, great-great-grandson of the great, great novelist, pointed his walking stick at the audience gathered here at the local library.
"Bah, humbug," he said. Dickens, an English actor, is 35, a little young yet, and far too pleasant looking, for the initial grave misanthropy of Ebenezer Scrooge, the famous character (created by his famous ancestor) that he was busily recreating on a makeshift stage.
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Still, that didn't faze the audience, 100 or so children and their mothers, all of them either being introduced to or revisiting "A Christmas Carol," the sentimental story of a bitter man redeemed by stern but benevolent ghosts on Christmas Eve.
It hasn't escaped Dickens' notice that, English provenance notwithstanding, the Carol, as scholars often refer to it, has become perhaps American's most significant -- secularly speaking -- holiday legend.
He has spent the last three Christmas seasons in the United States, doing one-man performances of the Carol and other Dickensiana in hotels, theaters and libraries, many in towns in the South and Midwest where live theater performances of any kind are far from daily fare. Here in Lone Jack, a rural community about an hour southeast of Kansas City, his listeners gathered afterward for autographs and a brush with literary history. |
