About

An Actor's Carol    A Christmas Play

A greeting from author Charles Evered:

Thank you so much for visiting this website. An Actor’s Carol tells the story of Hugh Pendleton, a cranky veteran actor who is sick and tired of playing Scrooge every holiday, subsequently suffers a nervous breakdown, and is visited by three ghosts of his own. It’s a play I wrote in tribute to the veteran actors I’ve worked with and the source material of “A Christmas Carol.”

Another reason I wrote the play was because I think there’s space for a new addition to the Christmas play offerings each year. An Actor’s Carol can be played as a stand-alone production or in repertory with A Christmas Carol. The same set can be used, as well as the same actors. It’s also meant to be an easy play to produce, with as few as 4 actors— one actor playing Hugh, and 3 actors playing seventeen other characters. It’s meant to be great fun for everyone.

Although I wrote An Actor’s Carol as primarily an entertainment, once I began rehearsing the first production in 2015, I started to realize it was a more personal play than I thought. The setting of a fledgling little theatre, my studies at Yale, my experience in Hollywood and most especially, my relationship with my sister Kathleen, (who in the play is called “Kate"), reminded me that there is more of my life in this play than I realized. My sister Kathleen was as supportive to me as Kate is to Hugh in the play. She believed in me whole-heartedly during my time at Yale and remained a fan of mine her entire life. Though Kathleen never got a chance to see the play, I’m honored to dedicate it to her.

I hope you enjoy this website. It was beautifully designed by Noelle Geiger, who herself appeared in the premiere production of the play. Please feel free to interact with us via this site and contact us directly with any questions about the play. And thank you very much for visiting.

Sincerely,
Charles Evered
Playwright, “An Actor’s Carol.”

An Actor's Carol Reviews

"The triumph of Charles Evered's AN ACTOR'S CAROL is that it takes an old story and makes it seem new...his modernized take on Dicken's ubiquitos holiday parable takes the Ebenezer scrooge story out of Pre-Industrial Revolution London and plops it in a squalid playhouse where season after season of no-budget theater has been subsidized by the holiday cash cow that A Christmas Carol has become. It works, because Evered's even handed, light hearted reinvention of the source material not only delivers Dicken's original story of human redemption, but also adds some very relevant ideas about tolerance, inclusion and the theater."

-Michael C. Moore, Kitsap Sun

"If A Christmas Carol restores our love of Christmas, AN ACTOR'S CAROL restores our love of Christmas AND theater!"

Hal Linden, Tony Award-winning actor

"Shines A 20th Century light on an old tale with cleverness, wit and charm."

-V.J. Hume, CV Independent

"A charming and hilarious modernization of A Christmas Carol."

-Catherine Randazzo, Associates Artist, Florida Studio Theater