The premiere at Loft Ensemble Theatre, Los Angeles, 2022
Standing, Bree Pavey as Mrs Dilber. Seated, L to R, Raymond Donahey as Bob Cratchit, Maia Luer, Matthew Monaco, Macedonia Bullington, Jay Hoshina and Robert Jolly as Cratchit kids, Madylin Sweeten Durrie as Emily Cratchit.
Photo by Sean Durrie.

A Christmas Carol like you've never seen it!

      Mrs. Dilber's Christmas Carol is a subversive new version of Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol, but instead of centering on the old rich guy, it features Mrs. Dilber - the housekeeper who takes the bedclothes from his still-cooling corpse in the original - and her epic attempt to get some bedcurtains of her own in spite of a series of ghosts and other diversions on a night adjacent to the more familiar story.

Why this play?

      I wrote the play because, well, I'm so tired of A Christmas Carol. I mean, I like it - it's a fun play, and I've seen some lovely versions... but I want something a little different. I'm ready for a change, and when I want to see a play that suits my tastes exactly, luckily I have an easy solution. Write it!
      It has some of the silly moments of The Lady Demands Satisfaction, actually, even sillier in many places, but with the same elemental core of seriousness - although where Lady dives into gender roles, Mrs. Dilber's Fabulous Bedcurtains aims squarely at the social inequality that has only gotten worse since Dickens wrote the original.
      Once I was into writing it, I started thinking about the fireplace in my childhood home in England. It was an old home - some parts of the house dating back 600 years, but the fireplace in the living room was Victorian. If you leaned your head in with a flashlight and looked up inside the flue, you could see the metal rungs built into the side to allow a small child to climb up inside the chimney with a brush to clean out the choking soot. It's hard to look at something like that today and fathom the careful, planned logic of building metal rungs into the chimney as it was constructed, but there they are.
      So yes, this is a comedy - and I think a funny one - but there are some serious elements in there too; and Mrs. Dilber talks about her childhood working in a cotton mill, and the opening line is from a child chimney sweep... that chimney and all it represents was in my mind when I wrote this one.

Mrs Dilber's Christmas Carol Premieres!

Mrs Dilber's Christmas Carol premiered in Los Angeles, at Loft Ensemble Theatre in North Hollywood, directed by Tor Brown and Marc Leclerc, and produced by Bree Pavey and Sarah Nilsen, under the original title Mrs Dilber's Fabulous Bedcurtains.
Loft Ensemble previously produced Long Joan Silver and The Lady Demands Satisfaction. This was my third production with them and I am SO EXCITED!

Sample Dialogue...

Lemon Baardsen as Ghost of Christmas Present
Photo by Sean Durrie

Mrs. Dilber's Christmas Carol, and a RADIO PLAY version of the play, are available from the playwright for production.