A Christmas Carol at the Kenan Center in Lockport
- Anthony Chase
- 5 hours ago
- 8 min read
When Family Dysfunction Meets Dickensian Redemption
By Anthony Chase
In Buffalo's annual proliferation of A Christmas Carol productions, the Kenan Center in Lockport faced a choice for their holiday offering: join the crowd with another Christmas Carol or offer something entirely new. They split the difference by enlisting Neil Wechsler and his daughter Sasha Wechsler to create an entirely new adaptation of Dickens’ beloved Christmas classic, directed by Kevin Leary. The rumor mill churned during the long rehearsal process: metatheatrical, improvised. Nobody quite knew what to expect.
What emerged deserves attention. The Wechslers have achieved something rare: a genuinely fresh take on material that seemed exhausted.
As the play begins, clocks chime, Edison bulbs flicker on and off in mechanical sequence. Collin Ranney's set design immediately announces that we're watching the machinery of theater itself, not hidden in the wings but visible, deliberate, and part of the storytelling.
We're in Pirandellian territory before a word is spoken. This will be theater interrogating theater, performance aware of itself as performance.
As the lights come up, the actors are revealed asleep on the floor of the stage. It is a family of four. One by one they awake. Father is flustered and harried. Mother is aghast to be seen without makeup. Brother and sister are on another trajectory entirely. These four actors will populate the entire world of Dickens's story, skillfully doubling as Bob Cratchit, Belle, Fezziwig, and all the other inhabitants of Scrooge's past, present, and future.
The frame: a fictional family of thespians has performed A Christmas Carol for generations. Tonight, everything threatens to fall apart. Father (Ricky Needham), all bluster and barely suppressed panic, tries to assert control over both production and family unit. Mother (Sarah Teplitsky) radiates theatrical self-involvement disguised as maternal concern; she wants her children to experience the transformative power of performance while remaining blind to how her own needs colonize theirs.
Daughter (Madeline Rehm) has sabotaged the production before it began, turning off every alarm clock in the house. She confronts her parents and the assembled audience with Wednesday Addams levels of adolescent hostility: "I warned you." The threat feels real. Will she actually destroy the evening? She will not. Her fury shields a vulnerability we only later glimpse.
Son (Quinn MiGillion) represents fragility where his sister embodies resistance. For him, everything threatens to overwhelm: the story's emotional intensity, the exposure of performance, the weight of family expectation.
Into this domestic chaos steps Scrooge (Stan Klimecko), who exists outside the family entirely. He's not part of their unit but something else, the story itself made flesh, mythic and unchanging, the tale this family must tell whether they want to or not. They never interact with this man, except in character. He is one character in search of redemption.
The structure asks actors to navigate two simultaneous dramatic arcs: Scrooge's redemption and this family's transformation. Both stories will question what we owe to tradition, to family, to the weight of inherited expectations. That the Wechslers accomplish this while including more of the details of Dickens's original narrative than most adaptations, all in 80 minutes without intermission, speaks to the tightness of their dramaturgy.
After the expository scenes, the play begins its turn into the supernatural elements of Dickens’ story. Upstage, a luminous globe is exposed, neither quite scenery nor quite symbol, but something in between. It places human drama against cosmic indifference, one man's redemption against the vast indifference of time and space. Domestic order is giving way to metaphysical inquiry; the design places this family’s private crisis against a universal void.
As Scrooge reaches his house, as in Dickens’ story, he finds the door knocker transformed into the face of his late partner, Jacob Marley. This is accomplished with the simplest of theatrical tricks, as Ricky Needham, now playing Marley, holds a flashlight held under his chin. It's in the province of children's sleepovers and amateur haunted houses, but it works brilliantly and draws us into the handmade world of a production in which simplicity becomes sophistication. In choosing the most obvious effect, the production announces its values: imagination and precision matter more than spectacle or budget. It's a moment of pure theatrical magic, proof that wonder requires only imagination and conviction.
Along these lines, Tiny Tim is realized as a puppet by Michele Costa, diminutive, blank-faced and mounted on a single wheel that propels his small legs. The choice is distancing and oddly moving at once, turning Tiny Tim into a fragile apparition rather than a sentimental emblem, and the audience clearly responds; each appearance draws a murmur of delighted recognition.
Mason Beggs's sound design proves equally crucial, but in ways more subtle and more startling. Theater sound is too often calibrated for empty houses, leaving volume too low once an audience has assembled. Here, the sound of clocks ticking and the turning of door locks genuinely startles with visceral impact. The supernatural manifests primarily through sound rather than vision, an approach perfectly suited to Dickens, whose text yearns to be read aloud, to be heard, to conjure worlds through voice, rhythm, and imagination.
Matthew DiVita’s lighting unobtrusively guides the eye through this machinery of memory and myth, defining space and shifting from domestic warmth to spectral chill without ever breaking the production’s handmade aesthetic.
Ricky Needham's Father carries paternal desperation beneath the bluster. This annual tradition represents more than family heritage; it's evidence that he can hold his family together through the unifying force of shared performance. When he transforms into Marley, dragging chains of regret, the character's eternal punishment mirrors the father's own fear: that he's bound his children to something they neither want nor need.
As the Ghost of Christmas Present, Needham radiates abundance shadowed by mortality. The spirit's ebullience can't quite conceal its awareness of time's limit, of how quickly joy curdles into loss. It's the most textured version of this ghost I've encountered, generous and sad simultaneously, celebrating life while acknowledging its brevity. Needham delivers three distinctly realized characters, each one compelling in its own right.
Sarah Teplitsky's Mother embodies theatrical self-involvement that seems constitutional rather than calculated, the natural byproduct of decades lived in service to emotional extremes. She genuinely wants her children to discover performance's transformative power. She simply can't see how her own needs devour the space where their needs might breathe, and yet somehow, Teplitsky makes narcissism almost sympathetic.
Madeline Rehm's journey from hostile teenager to committed performer provides the production's most satisfying arc, though it begins at such a pitch of venom that her transformation requires navigation. Her initial "I warned you" carries genuine threat she seems capable of actual sabotage rather than mere adolescent resistance.
As the Ghost of Christmas Past, Rehm embodies passive menace, an entity that knows every shameful secret and will oblige confrontation whether you're ready or not. This is no warmly nostalgic guide to pleasant memories, but something far more unsettling. Ranney's sun crown costume proves simultaneously beautiful and imperious, enlightening and exposing, radiating a light that reveals rather than comforts. It's a haunting and unforgettable vision.
Quinn MiGillion locates strength within his character's fragility. This is an actor who often appears to enter something like a trance state onstage, a shamanic possession that allows complete inhabitation of his characters. The sensitivity doesn't paralyze him; it becomes the very mechanism of his transformation. As the panic prone son, he gives himself over to freefalling emotional abandon. By contrast, as Fred, he radiates genuine joy; his optimism feels lived-in rather than performed.
To be specific, as Scrooge's nephew Fred, he becomes irrepressible, the persistent optimist whose good cheer survives even Scrooge's withering contempt. It becomes a performance that demonstrates what the son learns through the evening: that this fragile boy contains reserves of courage and capability he didn't know he possessed. The act of performance does not destroy the character’s sensitivity; rather, it gives that sensitivity form and purpose.
Stan Klimecko's Scrooge represents a significant departure from typical stage renderings of this character. I’ve seen Scrooges who were less subtle than Disney’s Scrooge McDuck. Klimecko is the least cartoonish Scrooge in my memory, no cackling villain, no miserly caricature, but a genuinely troubled man who has retreated into the cold comfort of money because money, unlike people, can be counted, controlled, relied upon never to betray or abandon. Klimecko walks this line with compelling effectiveness.
This interpretation makes transformation credible rather than merely convenient. We're not watching a monster become human but watching a human remember his own humanity, a crucial distinction that deepens emotional impact. Klimecko gives us a Scrooge who built his fortress of isolation stone by careful stone, or link by link, and who understands precisely what he sacrificed and convinced himself the trade was worth making. When those walls crumble, the collapse feels earned rather than imposed by Dickens's narrative machinery.
The production's development history included plans for improvised sequences. Taylor Theatre Artistic Director Kevin Leary worked closely with the playwrights and actors to shape the final form, in which improvisations have been replaced by scripted dialogue that maintains metatheatrical awareness. Leary's hand is evident in the production's disciplined balance between metatheatrical playfulness and dramatic honesty. Actors acknowledge the audience while maintaining the pretense of being actual people rather than fictional characters caught in Dickens's narrative.
By framing Dickens's tale within a family's struggle to maintain tradition against generational resistance and individual exhaustion, the Wechslers, father and daughter, found contemporary resonance without updating anything in the original story. The parallels work elegantly: Scrooge must open his heart; this family must see each other clearly rather than through the distorting lens of theatrical role-playing and inherited expectation.
Both redemption arcs intertwine. The daughter gains compassion by witnessing Scrooge's transformation; the son discovers confidence by inhabiting these challenging roles; the parents must confront whether the traditions they're preserving still serve the people trapped within them.
And so we are made to see that when tradition becomes obligation, it dies. When it becomes chosen participation, it lives.
The opening needs calibration, especially concerning the daughter. Show us rebellious but not monstrous, resistant but not irredeemable. We need to glimpse the vulnerability her cynicism protects, to see the person who might be reached by Scrooge's story before we watch that moment actually occurs.
Beyond artistic merit and a satisfying holiday entertainment, this production's existence matters for Western New York's theatrical ecology. The Kenan Center commissioned an original adaptation rather than licensing existing script, a decision that demonstrates serious ambition. The design elements, Ranney's sets and costumes, DiVita's lighting, Beggs's sound, match or exceed professional standards at the region’s most established venues.
Under Leary's artistic direction, Lockport is positioning itself as a place where artists can take risks and audiences can encounter genuinely fresh approaches to familiar material. In a regional landscape often dominated by safe, pre-packaged choices, the creative courage demonstrated here reminds us that tradition only stays alive when someone dares to reinvent it. This is a Christmas Carol that trusts its audience's intelligence.
A Christmas Carol continues through December 14, 2025; Fridays and Saturdays at 7:30 p.m., Sundays at 2:30 p.m., at The Kenan Center’s Taylor Theatre, 433 Locust Street, Lockport, NY.