Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, written at the dawn of the industrial revolution, remains a tale for our time. Driven to loneliness and despair by the fiends of commerce, Ebeneezer Scrooge is led by spirits on Christmas Eve to view his past choices, his present position in the community, and the bleak future of his paradise mountain home. He emerges on Christmas morning awakened to the power of love, community, and the natural world, committed in his heart to mend his miserly ways and destructive scheming.
Major changes distinguish Appalachian Ebeneezer from other adaptations of this familiar Christmas story. The setting is Paradise Holler in rural Appalachia during the depression of the 1930’s, when the mountains shook with industrial prospecting. Dickens’ story is a tale of the rich and the poor; we have chosen a place where this contrast is fresh in the American experience and less romanticized than in the typical Victorian “Christmas card” production. Traditional music in the production adds authentic expressions of the loves, struggles, fears and hopes of common folk. The “Mummer’s Play” in Act I is drawn from the folk traditions of the Southern mountains. These changes in place and period and the addition of folk music enhance and extend the universal elements of Dickens’ remarkable story for an American generation now grappling with the challenging legacies of three centuries of industrial upheaval.
Script Collaborators
Rändi Douglas wrote the 2019 revisions to Appalachian Ebeneezer, with review and input from both Cheyney Ryan, who co-wrote the original 1979 version, and Linda Danielson, who researched and selected the traditional music.
Rändi Douglas
Rändi has adapted, written and performed several scripts that illuminate literature, history and civil rights issues, among them: Molly Bloom from James Joyce’s Ulysses (touring the Pacific Northwest for 10 years, also produced at the international James Joyce festival in Dublin); Hillbilly Women, from the book by Kathy Kahn; Count on Me, about woman suffrage (touring Michigan for 10 years), and We Put the World on Wheels, about the United Auto Worker’s Union. She is an Equity actress with performing credits at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, Oregon Repertory Theatre, the Empty Space Theatre in Seattle, and Actor’s Theatre of Louisville. Recent credits include Abby in David Lindsay-Abaire’s Ripcord and Maude Gutman in Stephen Sachs’ Bakersfield Mist at Clackamas Repertory Theatre. She designed an interactive education outreach program called Detroit StoryLiving with Josh White, Jr. for the Detroit Historical Museums, touring schools throughout Michigan.
Cheyney Ryan
Cheyney’s ongoing dedication to social justice in theatre includes several works over three decades, including Shock and Awe, critical of the Bush administration’s war on terrorism; Holy Dirt (co-authored with Marcos Martinez), about Latino Americans in the Southwest and produced in the USA, England, Europe, and Africa; and For a Better World (Dos Historias), performed at the Yerba Buena Center and touring the Bay Area. He’s a founding member of Teatro Nuestro and Theatre Adelante, companies touring on the West coast with productions for and about migrant workers from 1987-96; he wrote La Boda and collaborated with Ernesto Ravetto on The Box and La Perla for these companies. He also played piano and wrote songs for Oregon cabaret groups On the Edge and Live Matinee.
Cheyney is Director of Human Rights Programs for the Program on Ethics and International Law at the University of Oxford, where he is also a member of Merton College. He is the author of numerous articles and the recent book The Chickenhawk Syndrome: War, Sacrifice and Personal Responsibility.
Linda Danielson
Linda is a folklorist, teacher and fiddler who has designed and performed traditional music for numerous theatre productions including Under Milkwood, Dark of the Moon, Quilters, and Appalachian Ebeneezer. For twenty-eight years Linda, David Stuart Bull, and Chico Schwall have performed an annual theatre tradition in Eugene, Oregon: A Celtic Holiday, based on a reading of Dylan Thomas’s A Child’s Christmas in Wales. Linda teaches workshops and private fiddle lessons and plays with several musical groups in Oregon. She directed the Oregon Oldtime Fiddling Project, recording interviews and music now housed in the Library of Congress and Western Oregon historical museums.
Linda is retired from the faculty of Lane Community College, Eugene, Oregon, where for twenty-five years she taught folklore, American Indian literatures, writers of the Pacific Northwest, and writing composition.