Ah, humbug!

Mark Lerman rethinks Trinity's Carol

by Bill Rodriguez

It's more like watching a ringmaster at work than a director. The upstairs theater of Trinity Repertory Company is aflurry with activity, preparing for the 23rd annual production of Dickens' A Christmas Carol. It's noisy between scenes, with everything but trumpeting elephants: a speaker booms with the stage manager summoning an actor, the music director hastily has singers practice a carol between scene run-throughs, tech people with head phones scurry about and consult.

Once in a while a snippet of dialogue gets rehearsed. Dan Welch as Bob Cratchit balances a wigged Styrofoam head on his shoulder while he and Phyllis Kay, Mrs. Cratchit, in high-pitched voices deliver Tiny Tim's lines between their own. Director Mark Lerman, shaggy-haired, wearing a black Perishable Theatre T-shirt, sitting among more behind-the-scenes people than most off-Trinity companies ever have in a play, occasionally bounds to the stage to make a suggestion to an actor. Mostly it's to block a scene, to shape the flow of activity. "Scrooge, you should catch Cratchit at the door, so he doesn't have to come to your desk," he says to Bill Damkoehler after the post-Christmas office scene is run through. Lerman steps down to answer a techie's question before watching another scene from the audience's point of view. For a harried guy, he certainly laughs with them a lot.

A few minutes later on a meal break, he sits in a conference room over an untouched Subway grinder, tired but still energetic. Since October 12, he hasn't had much time to spend with his two-year-old daughter Rae or his wife Kay Jenkins. He talks about why he is smiling through what are sometimes up to 17-hours-per-day, seven-day work weeks.

Wouldn't you grin if you were coaching in the big leagues? Thirty-five years old, artistic director since 1990 of Perishable Theatre, now located a half-block away from Trinity, the 1989 Trinity Conservatory grad was tapped last December to direct this play. And it's not just any production. A Christmas Carol is the cash cow that brings in most of Trinity's ticket revenue for the year. It's so popular that a second cast was established three seasons ago, to increase the number of performances with daytime shows. This year some 53,000 tickets are expected to be sold.

That is, if the players can be inspired to keep batting it out of the park.

For his part, Lerman has come up with a novel idea for the original Adrian Hall and Richard Cumming production, which has been staged at Trinity Rep since 1977.

"From the moment you walk into the space, it's visually a very different world. We've created a turn-of-the-century Victorian proscenium theater," he says. "It's funny, it's kind of the most traditional setting, but because it hasn't been done before that makes it very fresh and new."

The visual impact of a 50-foot-wide stage had its cost -- the stage could be only 20 feet deep, which is less than the black box space at Perishable. This was necessary because 600 of the 650 seats in the upstairs theater need to be used.

"The other thing that I brought into the production -- which has helped shape the look, the world, but isn't layered on so that it obfuscates the story -- is that I really think this is a play about the celebration of theater," Lerman adds. "As a theater artist, that's how I got passionate about the project and found my way in."

He goes on to explain that what happens to Scrooge is very much what happens to an audience member in a good theater production. Scrooge gets to watch the story of his life enacted for him.

"Basically, he's presented with a drama. And like a good piece of theater, he's challenged by it, provoked by it, and ultimately has quite a change by the end of it," the director elaborates. "He starts to question the way he's lived his life. Now, in that sense it's almost what an ideal piece of theater should be doing for the audience."

Lerman has been surprised at how open company members have been to the ideas of an outsider, particularly one without experience directing a production on this scale. At Perishable and elsewhere -- having directed in New York and San Diego, among other places -- he might have to work with a couple of dozen people on stage and behind the scenes, but here he is in charge of about 100. The cost of mounting this production edges north of $300,000, which approaches Perishable's entire annual budget of $370,000.

"I was nervous about the degree to which they'd be willing to look at this freshly," he says. "To everyone's credit, I was surprised. I wouldn't have blamed them, having done it for so many years, for having a sense of, like, `We know how to do this.' "

One serendipitous coincidence that helped is that two of the three actors playing Scrooge are also doing so for the first time: Damkoehler in the "Holly" company, and Fred Sullivan Jr. in the "Ivy" company. Sullivan has played Cratchit several times, but this year he is alternating as Scrooge with Tim Crowe, who has held a crowd-pleasing franchise on the role in recent years.

Oskar Eustis, Trinity's artistic director, says that he wanted a fresh voice for the holiday favorite, as well as someone familiar with the company. Choosing Lerman wasn't a difficult decision.

"I have tremendous admiration for Mark, and it's on a number of different levels," Eustis begins. "First of all, I've admired all of his work as a director, that I've seen since I came to Providence. Particularly the show that raised him in my estimation, his production of Aishah Rahman's Only In America. Which I thought was just a first-rate production with very difficult text. I thought it was clear and imaginative without in any way obscuring what the fundamental event had to be, which was the imagination of the text."

Eustis says that he started taking his arts district neighbor seriously as a director after that fall of 1997 run.

"What's also true is as a colleague in our little arts district here, he's been just exemplary. He's a tremendously practical guy. He's idealistic but with none of the air of impracticality and contentment with failure that one can associate with that," he notes, concluding laughingly.

"All of those qualities have really been borne out for me since he's been here at Trinity working on Christmas Carol. Terrific imagination. But also he's really a grown-up. We've had probably a simpler and better time discussing the production, giving notes and all the rest than I've had with anyone who's done it," he adds. "When we're talking about it we're talking about the production, we're not talking about his ego."

Sounds like this year A Christmas Carol at Trinity Rep is about theater in more ways than intended, and more than Ebenezer Scrooge is in for a transformation.