Q&A with Raye Birk

Stock portfolios and 401(k)s are looking absolutely Dickensian these days, so it was only a matter of time before our great literary minds started contrasting today’s hard times with, you know, hard times. In a recent Q & A in The New York Times Magazine, the novelist and literary critic Margaret Atwood argued that the nineteenth century could be examined from the point of view of which literary characters would have maxed out their credit cards. “Emma Bovary would have maxed hers out. No question,” Atwood claimed. “Mr. Scrooge would not have. He would have snipped his up.”

Scrooge as fiscally responsible role model? Jeez—that’s a new one. Talk about a drastic market correction.

With this year’s holiday season overlapping the collapse of the housing market, an international credit crunch, and a plummeting Dow, it’s possible that A Christmas Carol (this will be the Guthrie’s thirty-fourth consecutive staging of Dickens’s classic tale) might enjoy a spike in contemporary relevance (forgive me if I hedge). So I sat down with Raye Birk, a veteran actor who, after portraying Ebenezer Scrooge at the Guthrie for the past four years, might know “ol’ Eb” better than the ghosts of Christmas Past, Present, and Future combined.

“Scrooge would have more likely been a stockholder in a credit card company,” Birk says. “I think of him as a venture capitalist. When he got enough capital amassed at his firm—a counting house is what it is—he would then loan money to get the business started, taking a very healthy profit back if the business were successful.”

In today’s context, does Scrooge get a bad rap?
Well, that depends on what your interest is. If you’re a venture capitalist or . . .

Well, won’t a lot of people with retirement packages that are down 40 percent be coming to see your play?
Yes.

Trading complicated securities and unregulated credit default swaps—it’s all about the fine print. Maybe Scrooge’s counting house wasn’t heated that well, but wasn’t it operated efficiently?
Absolutely. “He was a very good man of business.” It’s in the opening lines. Shrewd. He knew how to cut a deal. He wasn’t sentimental. He was tough, like lots of developers and businessmen are today.

But wasn’t the subprime mortgage market built on a sentiment something like Christmas charity—lending money to people who are the least likely to pay it back?
Right, but I could see him as one of the middlemen—somebody really sharp who saw it as a chance to make some money and get out and pass it on and not assume the risk. As many of those people did.

Should somebody have stepped in and said “bah humbug” to the notion that every American deserves to own a home? Is this type of cheer and merriment irresponsible?
Well, I don’t know that cheer and merriment and heart necessarily go with owning a home. It’s a jump I’m not willing to make. But Dickens’s England was in much worse shape than our own country is in right now. Although for years our [now] Nobel laureate Paul Krugman has been talking about a growing divide between the rich and the poor, between management and the workers, et cetera. In England, it was much wider spread than it is here now. And it also had a class distinction that was built into society—between the nobility and the landed aristocracy and everyone else—which made the gulf even greater. What motivated Dickens was his concern about what was happening to children who were not getting an education and were forced to go to work at the age of eight. “Ignorance and Want,” remember? He spoke in front of Parliament about introducing an education act and was hooted down. That’s one of the reasons he wrote the book. Also, if you were in a certain station in life and your family fell on hard times, you went to debtors’ prison. And that happened to Dickens’s family, and he was deeply ashamed by it. Our world isn’t as harsh as that. I mean, we’re in dire straits now, but . . .

Are we in dire straits?
I don’t know. We’ve been told we are.

But isn’t the media in perpetual crisis mode? Buy! Sell! Wouldn’t Scrooge have given Jim Cramer a “bah humbug” too?
I would imagine Scrooge would have kept his own counsel. He would’ve been like a minor-league Warren Buffett. He had amassed huge capital, he was hugely successful, and he didn’t spend any money.

It’s difficult to see Scrooge spending $400,000 for a Marley and Scrooge Corp. executive team-building exercise at the St. Regis spa.
Absolutely. I mean, he would have been a terrible man to work for. Look at how begrudgingly he gives his only employee, Bob Cratchit, a day off on Christmas Day. He frames it as if he’s being taken advantage of. That’s pretty tight. And he’s tight about everything, not only about money and finances. He’s like that about every aspect relating to his heart.

Dickens wrote the book at a time when the tradition of celebrating Christmas had eroded. Now we have “Christmas creep,” with stores rolling out their Christmas trees before Columbus Day. Isn’t it time for a market correction on Christmas?
On the commercialization of Christmas? Oh, I think so. But that’s not what the story’s about. That wasn’t Dickens’s world at that time.

But won’t you join me in saying “bah humbug” to Christmas before Columbus Day?
Before Columbus Day, sure.

What about before Thanksgiving?
[Laughs.] I don’t want to draw a hard line. But to the spirit of what goes on in the play, which isn’t necessarily about Christmas per se. It happens at that time of year because that time of year is very special. But the play is about the transformation of a human being. He’s transformed. He’s changed. He chooses to behave differently.

But not on his own. Do you think the actions of the ghosts of Christmas Past, Present, and Future were interventionist?
A spiritual bailout? We could call this a spiritual intervention by a greater power—or is it a manifestation of something in his own psyche? That’s left very vague. I think he’s haunted by the fact that Marley died seven years ago that very night. Some part of his unconscious is disturbed at this point in his life when he’s getting near his own death. For me, the story is ultimately about a man facing his own death. And when we do that, it’s like that thing people say after they’ve had a near-death experience: “I saw my life flash before my eyes.”

Well, anybody who has a near death experience . . .
Absolutely! It changes them and transforms Scrooge. We talk about this. The director feels, and I sort of go along with it too, that it’s not that Scrooge is suddenly a different person. But he has this experience, and out of that, he chooses to behave differently. Which is why I think that that’s available to every person. I truly believe people have the capacity to change.

But sometimes a dramatic intervention is necessary if you’re going to achieve real change.
Well, look at Bush! Who knows what changes occurred, but he went through a huge intervention that had a religious component to it. I understand Billy Graham was very important to him.

Have you seen Lehman Brothers’ CEO Richard Fuld Jr.?
I’ve heard about him. Someone said he looks like Scrooge.

Fuld’s compensation package was $45 million last year, just before Lehman Brothers went bankrupt. He wasn’t good in business, but he got paid anyway. Now Scrooge wasn’t good “in mankind,” as he says, but he was good in business. And in today’s market, doesn’t that matter more to the general welfare?
Well, these financiers have certainly come to have a tremendous amount of power.

And there’s Tom Petters, who gave millions to charity, even while he was allegedly stealing from his investors.
I don’t think anybody ever accused Scrooge of being a crook. He was a good capitalist, a good man of business.

So is Scrooge a man of honor, if not a man of heart?
Well, that’s an interesting distinction to make. He certainly wasn’t a man of heart. The thing is, there was no pleasure in his life. He’s locked away all sense of joy, pleasure, those things that Dickens would say are “at the heart of making life worth living”—family, friends, warmth—the things that don’t cost a lot of money.

5 Things You Didn’t Know About Birk He earned an MFA as a McKnight Fellow at the University of Minnesota in 1967. His first role at the Guthrie was Mr. Bennett in Pride and Prejudice. He teaches an acting class at the Guthrie for working actors called “Actors Workout.” He portrayed Ebenezer Scrooge for four years at a San Francisco theater before assuming the role at the Guthrie. He moved back to the Twin Cities after his wife took a job as a museum curator with the Bridges of St. Paul development project.