‘Christmas Carol’ origin story is setting for ICT Rep comedy

Wichita Repertory Theatre’s “The Past, a Present Yet to Come” is a look at the making of Charles Dickens’ “A Christmas Carol.”

Kinda. Sorta.

“The writer’s pretty open in saying that this, like 99% of all plays, is completely fictional,” ICT Rep artistic director Julie Longhofer said. “But it has these little breadcrumbs in it that are part of history.”

ICT Rep debuts the play next weekend for four performances at Turnverein Hall in the Old Cowtown museum, fitting the Victorian setting of the production.

The three-person play shows Dickens (played by Mark Schuster) in the midst of rewriting “Oliver Twist” because the character of Fagan was panned as being too anti-Semetic. Still smarting from a failed book called “Martin Chuzzlewit,” Dickens enters the universe of theatrical producer J.B. Roth (Charlene Grinsell) and Fred Frederickson (Coleman Adams) — the nephew of Ebenezer Scrooge.

“When we first meet this Charles Dickens, he is clearly very intelligent, but not very well spoken, and he mumbles his way through several scenes, but whenever he kind of comes alive with a new idea, that then turns into writing,” Longhofer said. “Then he becomes more and more eloquent. The longer he has to work on a piece of writing, the better the writing gets.”

Dickens and Roth, who is a fictionalized version of a real producer, have a past that comes into play.

“They also have a really interesting repartee, because he’s about the only person who’s as smart as she is, so they have a lot of fun bouncing off each other,” Grinsell said.

“Fred is a very young, optimistic, pie-in-the-sky man with big ideas who has a bunch of wacky, get-rich-quick schemes, and his latest is to, uh, stage a half-intervention, half-prank on his uncle Ebenezer to try to convince him to be a better man and thereby secure funding for his latest harebrained scheme,” Adams said.

Director J.R. Hurst said he immediately took to the script when Longhofer showed it to him.

“The writing is very tight, very funny, but also the characters ring true, even though they have the kind of exaggerations that you need for comedy,” he said. “I told (the cast), and this is in no way a criticism, it struck me as the very best of good sitcom writing. The characters have amusing traits, but they ring true. As well as being funny, they have warmth and vulnerability, but they are just much more quick-witted in their speaking than people in real life usually are.”

Adams, who directed a radio play version of “A Christmas Carol” for Wichita Community Theatre last year, was also impressed when he read the script.

“It’s actually been pretty cool to see a different take on it. Both of them are obviously interpretations. The first was more queuing to the text, and this is reverse engineering the story of how it came about,” Adams said.

“It is very quick, and the characters are all on the ball, and they all have their own motivations, but also their own perspective on the world that bounce off of each other in very funny ways,” he added. “They’re each, in turn, the straight man and the comedic relief, which is a fun dynamic.”

The playwright, Matt Schatz, has a range of theatrical, movie and television credits, including co-writing the upcoming “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory” animated series with Taika Waititi for Netflix.

Longhofer discovered the play in a catalog, and said the timing worked perfectly for a small-scale show after last month’s “Amadeus,” the largest production of its season.

To the best of Longhofer and the cast’s knowledge, ICT Rep is only the second company to produce “The Past, a Present Yet to Come.”

If anyone feels like mid-November is too early to bring out something related to “A Christmas Carol,” Longhofer said she agrees.

“I don’t do a Christmas play, because I think the market is way oversaturated, and this one, strangely enough, doesn’t actually push Christmas at all. As a matter of fact, the author says ‘This play is dedicated to every Jewish writer who ever had to write a play about Christmas,’” she said. “And so, it really does kind of work as a prequel.”

“It’s more about the idea of Christmas than Christmas itself,” Hurst added.

‘THE PAST, A PRESENT YET TO COME’ BY ICT REP

When: 7:30 p.m. Thursday-Saturday, Nov. 13-15; 2 p.m. Sunday, Nov. 16

Where: Turnverein Hall, Old Cowtown museum, 1855 Museum Blvd.

Tickets: $35 adults, with discounts for seniors, veterans, those under 30 and students, from ictrep.org or 316-612-2543