An epic undertaking

This holiday season, theaters across the country will celebrate by staging some form of Charles Dickens' classic "A Christmas Carol." There will be community theater plays and at least 50 professional productions, including Theatre in the Park's long-running musical comedy in Raleigh.

All will star that archetypal misanthrope, Ebenezer Scrooge. Inevitably, before each show ends, Scrooge will have a change of heart, just as he has every December since 1843.

Joseph Haj, artistic director of PlayMakers Repertory Company, has nothing against "A Christmas Carol." But this season, he's trading in Tiny Tim for a lesser known, down-on-his-luck Dickens' protagonist: Nicholas Nickleby.

When the curtain goes up in Chapel Hill on Wednesday, PlayMakers will become just the second American theater to mount "The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby," a play by British playwright David Edgar that runs 6 1/2 hours in two parts.

It's a massive risk for the company members, both artistically and financially. Not only do they have to get the show off the ground, they also must persuade people to say "Bah, humbug" and come to the theater twice to see a less familiar drama about hard times in Victorian England.

"It's a giant show, and giant shows take a lot of money to make," Haj said. "I don't think too much about it -- because that way madness lies -- but if it misses by a wide margin, we'll be in some very big trouble."

Plans for this production date to 2006, when Haj took over PlayMakers, UNC's resident professional theater company. With 25 actors, 700 costume pieces and more than 100 people working behind the scenes, Haj says "Nickleby" will really test the organization, but he considers the test an obligatory challenge.

"I have an 18-member, classically trained, resident acting company," Haj said. "If we're not going to make this kind of work, who's going to?"

So he got in touch with Edgar, who was so excited that he agreed to spend the first week of rehearsal with the company. And so 29 years after the Royal Shakespeare Company premiered "Nickleby" in London -- with a cast that included Roger Rees (from "Cheers") and Ben Kingsley -- Edgar found himself sitting in a rehearsal hall in Chapel Hill.

"He was sitting at the table, so excited, saying, 'I think we can rewrite this!'" Haj recalled. "He was recrafting the piece around the skills of our company. ... He's remarkable."

A cast known and loved

Of the 25 cast members, 18 are faculty members or students at the university. Few American theaters draw from such a deep permanent talent pool. Of the remaining seven actors, all but one were handpicked from previous PlayMakers casts. If other area actors wanted a chance to audition, well, Haj had only five weeks, and he doesn't like to play icebreakers.

"You can spend the first two weeks of rehearsal getting to know each other," he said. "We just didn't have time for that. We had to be going from the gate, so it was really important to work with people we knew and loved."

Jeffrey Meanza is one of the actors Haj knows best. A graduate of UNC's drama program, Meanza is PlayMakers theater's education and outreach director. He has a decade of professional acting in New York and San Francisco on his resume, but he's never done a show like "Nickleby."

"At the top of rehearsal every day, when the stage manager says, 'Ladies and gentlemen, it's one o'clock,' everyone in the rehearsal hall cheers," Meanza said. "When we come back from a break, there are Rebel yells. It's a totally unique experience. We are all pulled together."

Three weeks into rehearsal, Meanza said the cast members were still working hard to "wrap our heads around the sequence of events." He's playing six characters, so not only is he memorizing his exits and entrances (from all over the Paul Green Theatre) but he's also plotting out 20 costume changes and mentally preparing himself to shift among six roles.

From street urchins to milliners to lords and ladies, the company members will play a total of 113 named characters. And if the actors are having difficulty differentiating among their own roles, how will the audience follow who's who?

Haj thinks it will be surprisingly easy. The costume changes won't be drastic - no burying the men in facial hair. And Edgar's script aims to keep the action clear. The actors take turns narrating the story. For example, when Nicholas' Uncle Ralph takes him to meet with a schoolmaster at a coffee shop, the actor playing the waiter will turn to the audience and introduce the scene.

"That narration serves as the connective tissue," Haj said. "It's storytelling in a fantastically theatrical way."

Up-to-the-minute plot

It does take a good bit of connective tissue to tie this marathon narrative together. There's not a plot per se, more like a series of unfortunate events, starting with the death of Nicholas' father, who falls prey to the 19th-century equivalent of the Bernie Madoff scandal. The elder Nickleby "speculated" his modest wealth and ended up penniless, while his stockbrokers bought homes in Florence.

"That sounds so to-the-minute to me," Haj said. "Like it could have been written yesterday. Money drives the whole story: Who has, who doesn't, and what people are willing to do to get it."

The specifics of the story may be more familiar to Anglophiles and bookworms than to the average theatergoer. So to that end, PlayMakers has planned a series of mostly free discussions, teas and talks at area libraries and bookstores. It's called the Dickens Initiative, and it's bankrolled by a $30,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Arts.

"It's a big grant," Haj said. "Here we are in tough economic times. We are daring to do this very big, very hard, expensive play. Their support is really, really meaningful to us."

The $311,000 budget for "Nickleby" represents about one-sixth of the company's budget for the year.

PlayMakers hopes the end result is that just as many people -- or more -- buy tickets to "Nickleby" than would have come if the theater had put on a holiday classic. Those who come should leave with a sense of accomplishment. Sitting through two three-plus-hour shows is not for the faint of spirit.

"There is something about the fact that it's hard," Haj said. "The audience feels it is doing its part by participating in the journey of this big epic play. Maybe it's like reading the 700-page novel."

Or maybe "Nicholas Nickleby," the play, will be even better.

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