No matter how many times I hear “Come Thou Fount,” I still think of an angry Victorian man shouting, “Bah, humbug!” when we reach the Ebenezer line.
The name has become synonymous with Charles Dickens’s beloved Christmas Carol. After bringing his own adaptation to life, playwright A. S. “Pete” Peterson has become well acquainted with Ebenezer Scrooge and his spiritually significant name.
Peterson—brother of Rabbit Room founder and musician Andrew Peterson—serves as artistic director of Rabbit Room Theatre, whose adaptation of A Christmas Carol debuts December 7 in Franklin, Tennessee.
The Nashville-based Rabbit Room Theatre has enjoyed a broad scope and reach in its relatively short lifespan. In 2022, its adaptation of Corrie ten Boom’s The Hiding Place ran locally in Franklin to sold-out audiences, and the following year was released in movie theaters across the US and internationally.
When considering what project to bring to the stage next, Peterson turned to one of his favorite authors.
“It’s been a lot of fun to dig into the language of somebody you look up to so much,” said Peterson, a devout Christian and a lifelong fan of Dickens “To get to live in their sentences and their story structure and figure out how their brain was working … to put your own version of it alongside theirs is really rewarding.”
A Christmas Carol is shorter than most of Dickens’s other works and is divided into five chapters, called “staves.” Peterson said that the brevity in the text afforded him the opportunity to build on the existing structure and play with the gaps in the story.
“You can read it in one sitting, and that opens it up to a lot of room to build out the meat and bones of it in different ways,” Peterson said. “Every adaptation does that a little differently.”
One of the angles Peterson approached in studying the text was to examine how the character of Scrooge came to be such a humbug.
He noticed a recurring image throughout the story of a small boy: Scrooge’s childhood self, Tiny Tim, and the hauntingly gaunt boy called Ignorance who appears with the girl Want underneath the robes of the Ghost of Christmas Present. Peterson realized how much the neglect and trauma of Scrooge’s childhood had contributed to the hardened, twisted adult Scrooge.
“The show that we’ve built gives us a really good roadmap from childhood through adulthood of seeing how a person can end up as this really angry, twisted, cold miser that Scrooge has become,” Peterson said. “And if we can understand how he became that way, then I think we can better understand how he can change.”
The character of Scrooge undergoes a miraculous transformation of divine intervention, repentance, and faith.
“Scrooge says, ‘The three spirits will strive within me,’ and I think that’s a real clue,” Peterson said. “The Trinity, the threefold spirit, strives within me—making me, sanctifying me, making me better than I was before.”
Even the name Ebenezer means “stone of help,” taken from 1 Samuel 7:12: “Then Samuel took a stone and set it up between Mizpah and Shen. He named it Ebenezer, saying, ‘Thus far the Lord has helped us.’”
While Dickens doesn’t explicitly explain the meaning of this name, Peterson believes there was both intentionality and significance to his naming, which is often a characteristic of Dickens’s storytelling.
In exploring that background, Peterson found ample source material from Dickens’s life, adding allusions to David Copperfield, a work considered to be largely autobiographical, as “Easter eggs” in the show.
Dickens not only experienced mistreatment as a child himself but also as an adult was moved by the plight of poor British children and sought to advocate for them through his writing.
After a visit to one London institution, Dickens wrote to a newspaper to enlist the attention of the readers to the efforts “to introduce among the most miserable and neglected outcasts in London, some knowledge of the commonest principles of morality and religion; to commence their recognition as immortal human creatures.”
“He had gone on a tour to visit all these places and see the facts for himself, and he was so affected by that tour that he decided he was going to do something about it,” Peterson said. “What he wanted to do about it was write a political pamphlet.”
Instead of writing a pamphlet, Dickens ended up writing A Christmas Carol. The resulting work, Peterson said, is a much more effective tool.
Dickens’s original audiences thought so too. Shortly after its publication, Dickens wrote in a letter,
I have great faith in the poor; to the best of my ability, I always endeavor to present them in a favorable light to the rich; and I shall never cease, I hope, until I die, to advocate their being made as happy and as wise as the circumstances of their condition in its utmost improvement, will admit of their becoming.
His social advocacy was not merely humanitarian but also grounded in his faith. “He was motivated, I think, by the gospel and his care for children,” Peterson said. “Dickens is really clear that he definitely had a strong Christian faith. It bears out in a lot of his work.”
A Christmas Carol is one of his works that bears the marks of his faith with particular clarity.
Certainly, the story reflects the mercy toward the marginalized spoken of in James 1:27: “Religion that God our Father accepts as pure and faultless is this: to look after orphans and widows in their distress.”
While Peterson calls the story inherently a deeply Christian one, his adaptation also reflects his own faith.
“I’m foundationally a Christian. All of my stories and the ways that I tell them are foundationally Christian, and so I see it as a mission,” he said. “We get to invite people from all over the city into our storytelling … to tell these beautiful stories that bear the truth of Christ and the kingdom.”
Courtesy of The Rabbit Room TheatreProducer and director Matt Logan was instrumental in promoting Peterson’s first foray into theater—The Battle of Franklin. Since then, the two have teamed up to form a symbiotic creative partnership for several productions, including The Hiding Place.
“Matt and I have learned that we have very similar storytelling styles,” Peterson said. “I’m able to write in a way that he enjoys developing on stage, and I think the way that he works on stage is something that enables me to write specifically for his skill set.”
Logan’s costuming and casting pedigree includes such Broadway credits as The Lion King, and he is also an established actor, director, and illustrator. He designed sets and costumes for the play’s upcoming premiere run, taking a creative direction Peterson calls a marriage of modern theater techniques with the traditional Victorian.
“You don’t do theater because you want to exactly represent a 19th-century street. Theater flourishes in its abstractions and its ability to paint beautiful pictures with light and space,” Peterson said. “We’re really leaning into that with this show.”
Peterson and Logan have been working on the production for the past year and a half, including multiple workshops with the cast and crew.
“It’s such a deeply Christian story that has so thoroughly pervaded our English-speaking culture,” Peterson said, “that it’s just a great opportunity to spread the good news.”
A Christmas Carol runs December 7–22 at the Franklin Special School District (FSSD) Performing Arts Center in Franklin, Tennessee, and tickets are available at rabbitroomtheatre.com. Peterson’s stage play is also available for purchase at store.rabbitroom.com.
Erin Jones is a freelance writer and the founder of Galvanize and Grow Copywriting. More of her writing can be found on erinjoneswriter.com.
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