Their efforts have turned the three-story building behind the church at 10th and Ludlow Streets into a congenial performing arts center with a second- floor main-stage theater seating between 150 and 200, a basement studio theater with a capacity of 75, and a first-floor lobby that invites sociable mingling.
The building can be considered a success. The first production in it cannot.
It was probably inevitable that the occasion would upstage the show. Expectations may have been too high, although the Arden has done excellent work in the past.
Appalachian Ebeneezer - the company's largest production to date - fits into the Arden's artistic policy of translating worthwhile works of literature into theater. The piece is a reworking of Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol into American terms. It takes place not in Victorian London but in a coal- mining town of Depression-era Pike County, Ky.
The conversion of a curmudgeonly skinflint into a do-gooder is still accomplished by the visitation of the ghosts of Christmases past, present and future. But the idiom is that of an Appalachian folk tale, or a synthetic equivalent thereof, as worked out by writers Cheyney Ryan and Randi Douglas.
The ghosts have become "haints." A forceful "Dangnabit!" is the strongest language in use. And the townspeople have an alarming tendency to
break suddenly into a folk song or a hoedown.
Scrooge is, if I heard correctly, the operator of a pawnshop, a business he acquired through the generosity of mine operator Jacob Marley in return for help in hushing up a scandal about an explosion in the mine. Bob Cratchit is still Scrooge's much-abused clerk and Tiny Tim has survived, crutch and all.
But the voice is no longer that of Charles Dickens, and he is sorely missed. Minnie Pearl is not a satisfactory substitute.
