Thursday, November 20, 2008

One thing Liesl Tommy recalls from taking part in a Trinity Rep production of A Christmas Carol a decade ago was looking out in the audience and seeing an elderly man dabbing his eyes with a handkerchief as miserly old Ebenezer Scrooge awoke on Christmas morning to realize it was not too late to change his ways.

Now Tommy is back at Trinity to direct the Dickens classic, which opens in previews tomorrow. And she has not forgotten that touching moment.

“The first day of rehearsal, despite some of my crazy ideas, I said that’s the core of the story, that is still moving, the transformation and redemption that affects us all year after year.”

This is sort of a homecoming for Tommy, who attended Trinity’s conservatory program back in the mid-1990s, when she was in the cast of Christmas Carol. Mauro Hantman, who is playing one of the Scrooges this year, was a classmate of hers. Ron Cesario, who designed a gown for her back then, is now doing the costumes for the show.

She has in recent years directed a couple of shows put on by student actors at Trinity, but this is the first main stage production she has directed. And her ideas seem to be right in line with the Trinity aesthetic, the kind of in-your-face theater produced by Adrian Hall and Richard Jenkins. She said in a recent interview that she’s looking to create a “highly theatrical, physical kind of event.”

“So if there’s going to be ghosts,” she said, “I’m going to take that to the edge.”

Actually, there are more ghosts than usual in Tommy’s take on this popular show. She said there will be a whole “posse” of ghosts. When Scrooge’s partner, Jacob Marley, dies, everyone in the show is a ghost, she said.

“One of the things I’m playing with right now,” she said a couple of weeks ago, “is how to really have fun with the ghosts, how to make the show exciting, thrilling and scary — but not too scary, because we’ve got kids in the audience.

Tommy said she has in recent years been intrigued by Japanese ghost stories and Asian horror films. What she has learned from them is how to build suspense. It’s not so much the appearance of the monster that’s scary in these movies and stories, but the anticipation of its appearance. And that’s one of the things she’s been working on as she put together the show.

She said she has been using the child actors to gauge just how scary a scene should be. She can see in their eyes when they begin to get nervous and she backs off a bit.

Tommy, who was born in Cape Town, South Africa, but spent much of her teens in the Boston suburbs, is one of the country’s hottest young directors. She was just at the Dallas Theater Center where she is directing a new play about the civil rights movement called The Good Negro. The show will also play New York’s Public Theater, where Oskar Eustis is now in charge.

She’s been on the road so much this year — working in several Southern states, Rwanda, Uganda and Toronto — she has only spent a couple of months at home in her New York apartment.

Her family moved to the United States during the 1980s, when Tommy was 14. Conditions in then violent South Africa had become intolerable for her father, a community organizer and city planner. Her parents later moved back to South Africa when Nelson Mandela was elected president.

“It was a shock coming from apartheid and living in a colored township, coming to Massachusetts where some people didn’t even know what apartheid was,” she said.

“It was a difficult transition, but I was saved by theater. I did a play in high school and from then on I knew what I wanted to do. I felt very lucky to be so clear.”

This is the first time Tommy has directed Christmas Carol. And she has spent a lot of time preparing for it, re-reading Dickens, one of her favorite authors, listening to Christmas music and working with set designer Michael McGarty, who has come up with an imposing set of buildings that include Scrooge’s office, his house and an abandoned structure.

“Michael just understood right away that I was trying to do something big and theatrical,” said Tommy. “I want people to come into the theater and have an exciting time. We’re going through a tough time right now and it’s going to get tougher by Christmas. If people can come to this show for a couple of hours it will be good.”

This, in other words, is a traditional Christmas Carol, albeit with some quirks that make it “edgy.” Fans of the show will be glad to know that there will be snow, and lots of it, along with traditional carols and flying ghosts.

As usual, the show uses the adaptation by Adrian Hall along with quite a bit of added Christmas music, old carols that Tommy has found. She said that music director Doug Brandt will also be “tweaking” the traditional musical score by Richard Cumming.

“It’s kind of like an explosion of Christmas,” said Tommy who confessed to being a huge fan of the holiday. “What I’m looking for is to keep everything that we love, but also make it fresh.

“I don’t want to come up with a Christmas Carol with people in 1950s costumes. I like having the Dickens experience.”

Joe Wilson Jr. will be sharing the role of Scrooge with Hantman on alternating nights, and both are fairly young men, which will be something of a change.

But Tommy said the character of Scrooge is not about age, but about the breakdown of the spirit.

“He’s stopped connecting with his fellow man.”

Tommy said she also admires both actors and that their work matches her style of directing, “which is passionate.”

“I’m just trying to bring the essence of Dickens’ story to the forefront, which is that there is always hope for humanity, that when people are shown the way they can change and they can care.”

A Christmas Carol opens tomorrow and runs through Dec. 31 at Trinity Rep, 201 Washington St., Providence. Tickets range from $25-$60, but are $10 for children under 14. Also adults get a $10 discount for tickets purchased before Thanksgiving. Call (401) 351-4242 or log on to www.trinityrep.com .