By: Onteya Zachary

As a member of the Honors Program, I have always found pride in the shared community value of taking learning outside. Especially, considering this value parallels the Roosevelt University motto of Chicago as our campus. There are unlimited opportunities to stimulate and engage in each of your individual curiosities in every corner of the city. This semester, I began my journey engaging with the Honors theme of the “Best Laid Plans” through my academic involvement such as the Honors Exchange, No Small Plans, my Honors courses such as The Nature of Science, and experiential opportunities to learn through programming and lectures– such as Race and the City— that are open to students free of charge through the American Dream Reconsidered conference.

I wondered, however, how the theme could be applicable to life outside of campus. Thus, last weekend, I attended Manual Cinema’s Christmas Carol. A magically inventive puppet play adapted from the renowned Charles Dickens’ novel A Christmas Carol. Prior to the play, I did not have drastic expectations. I was thrilled I could attend a puppet play, which has become a newfound love of mine, and excited to see a puppet play that revolved around the Christmas holiday which seemingly crept up stealthily throughout the Fall semester. Lo and behold, my expectations did not go as planned as I soon realized this was not a usual retelling of Dicken’s iconic holiday ghost story.

Upon walking into the theater, the scene was unique and one whose sensation upon viewing is indescribable. Stacked on a large, red woven rug were several cardboard boxes with bold, black writing on the side– ‘JOE’S SHIRTS’, ‘JOE’S SHOES’, ‘JOE’S MUSIC’. Upon a circular, wooden table sat a large tripod set up with a laptop. The camera on the tripod was strictly focused on a small, makeshift stage roughly the size of a doll house. As I found my way to my seat, I pondered upon who Joe could be, why his stuff was in boxes, and most importantly how that scene could somehow capture the story of A Christmas Carol. Nothing within the scene seemed conducive to the story I knew. Even live musicians chattered visibly behind the entire scene and adjacent to them were unmanned large, vintage film cameras. Shortly thereafter, the lights dimmed and the show began.

Full of humor and timeliness, Manual Cinemas Christmas Carol tells the story of both Scrooge and a new character, Aunt Trudy, a recent widow alone on Christmas for the first time following the passing of her husband, Joe, who died due to health complications with Covid-19. When the play began, the foundation for the unique retelling of this classic story was set through the shared experience of isolation, loss, and regret that Aunt Trudy is navigating as she attempts to continue Joe’s beloved family puppet show tradition over Zoom. Throughout the play, audience members and I watched in bewilderment and surprise as Aunt Trudy endured a transformative “dark night of the soul” similar to that of Scrooge’s. In its essence and at its core, the play was about an individual spending Christmas alone, haunted by the specters of their past, and anticipating their own mortality. Originally, the play was even performed as an online streaming production in December 2020 when most of us were quarantined at home. 

In my reflection following the show, I realized this play had shattered my expectations and provided me with a unique retelling of Dicken’s A Christmas Carol I’ll never forget. Partially, because the puppets and puppeteers in and of themselves created no small plan. By strategically incorporating elements of timeliness and humor into the story were they able to create a product that could so intimately address the themes of isolation and loss. Not only did I appreciate the play, but I appreciated the lens the Honors Program theme provided me to view the play through. From the micro to the macro level in the creation to the viewing of the production, planning was a tool so essential to the process and this atypical retelling blossomed from that effort to become a beautiful story in and of its own right.