PRICELESS MULA

Don’t take work home.

Failing to heed such advice could be hazardous to your health or impede those seeking a balanced life.

Near the end of his 1991 to 1998 run portraying Scrooge in A Christmas Carol at Goodman Theatre in Chicago, playwright/ actor/director Tom Mula often hauled his work home unwittingly.

“Getting to play the part of Scrooge fulfilled my dream,” the 72-year-old Mula says. “Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol is a work of genius. But doing two shows a day, when Goodman crammed shows on its schedule right before and right after Christmas, was physically exhausting. I felt beat up. I gave notice—one more year. At home I’d wake up in the middle of the night, still expressing my Scrooge face.

“My facial muscles were stuck, locked in, forming Scrooge’s intense frown.”

Mula is all smiles these days. That will certainly be clear at Studio5 in Evanston on December 9, when the award-winning playwright and retired Columbia College Chicago adjunct theater professor performs a staged reading of his beautiful novel, Jacob Marley’s Christmas Carol—which tells Dickens’ famous tale from the perspective of Scrooge’s former business partner. Acclaimed pianist Larry Schanker will provide an improvised piano score to accompany Mula’s inspiring, funny, touching story.

The show, which caps off Studio5’s fall season, starts at 8 p.m.

“It’s a fun ride,” Mula says. “I’m an old ham, and humor is a significant part of the reading. Larry is an incredible composer and musician. He and I, when we’re up there on stage, execute a wonderful ‘dance’ together. Because I love A Christmas Carol so much, I made sure Jacob Marley’s Christmas Carol wouldn’t be viewed as a parody. I believe it gives an audience an experience that’s as redemptive and uplifting as a showing of A Christmas Carol does.”

Having lunch with the 10-year-old daughter of his friend Terry McCabe, a director—after playing Scrooge in an early 1990s matinee of A Christmas Carol at Goodman—prodded Mula to pick up a pen and begin a three-year undertaking.

Hazel Flowers-McCabe was in between bites of french fries when she uttered, “Jacob Marley got a raw deal.”

Mula seconded the assertion, immediately. Scrooge, after all, got a second chance. Ghost/ purgatory dweller Marley had to clank around interminably in chains and money boxes.

“I’d always felt what Hazel felt,” says Mula, a longtime Chicagoan. “I also felt sorry for Jacob Marley. It was a terrible injustice, what Marley endured. The story demanded to be written, thrust upon the public. A line written by Dickens served as the seed. Marley tells Scrooge, ‘You have a chance and hope of escaping my fate, a chance and hope of my procuring, Ebenezer.’”

Mula grew up in the central Illinois city of Monticello (pop. 2,612, in 1950) and attended Monticello High School, home of the Sages. His father, Frank, was an art teacher. Mom Helen loved books and worked where thousands of them called home, the local library.

As a third grader, Mula wanted to be an actor or a playwright. At age 14, he traveled 40 miles to Sullivan to audition for a role in a non-union play at The Little Theatre on the Square. The play: A Christmas Carol. No(el) kidding. The budding actor and avid Dickens fan had worn out a certain LP—Lionel Barrymore’s 1939 radio version of A Christmas Carol—at home and relished the opportunity to recite familiar lines as a cast member.

“My hand went right up when they asked who wanted to play Jacob Marley,” Mula recalls. “Nobody else’s did.” The chains Mula wore for the show belonged to the family of his good friend Jim. Who needs a costume department when tire chains in Jim’s garage are readily available?

Mula earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in directing at the University of Illinois in 1973. Thirty-eight years later, at age 60, he got his MFA in creative writing at Columbia College Chicago, where he taught acting, directing, and playwriting from 1986 to 2020.

The playwright wrote, among other works, Almighty Bob, Golem, and Sylvia’s Real Good Advice (based on Nicole Hollander’s “Sylvia” comic strip). His Jacob Marley’s Christmas Carol show enthralled audiences for two seasons (1998, 1999) at Goodman Theatre, was nominated for four Joseph Jefferson Awards, and received an After Dark Award and the Goodman School of Drama’s Cunningham Prize for playwriting. Mula won a Jeff Award for Golem and another one for Sylvia’s Real Good Advice.

In the fall of 1994, then-Chicago Tribune staffer Kathy O’Malley attended a Mula reading of Jacob Marley’s Christmas Carol and wrote a glowing review of it. Adams Media published it in 1995. It has been performed, either as a one-man show or as a show featuring a cast of four, more than 400 times on four continents.

“It’s fun and satisfying, performing Jacob Marley’s, especially when the laughs land and I hear only a few coughs,” Mula says. “I remember how I felt when I first performed as Scrooge (at Goodman Theatre)—terrified. But that energy was useful, perhaps like much-needed fuel. I then became more comfortable with each show. Actors on stage sometimes find themselves in a completely focused mindset, or a ‘zone’, to the point where they might think, ‘This must be what Michael Jordan or Yo-Yo Ma experienced many times.’

“I remember hearing about a moment involving Laurence Olivier after one of his performances. At a production of Othello, I believe. Olivier must have been in that ‘zone.’ Someone told him offstage, ‘You were magnificent!’ Olivier replied, ‘I have no idea what I did.’”

Mula knows Studio5 well. He has performed there at least five times and thinks the world of its co-founders, Dance Center Evanston Director Bea Rashid and Emmy- Award winning composer and jazz musician Steve Rashid. Studio5 is a performing arts venue that opened in Evanston in 2016, bringing professional dance, music, and spoken word events to a 128-seat theater.

“It’s such a pleasant setting, with cabaret tables and performers performing close to the audience,” Mula says. “I always look forward to appearing there. It’ll be another terrific experience, another lovely evening.”

Minus the frozen, intense frown.

Studio5 is located at 1934 Dempster Street in Evanston. For more information about Tom Mula: A Reading of Jacob Marley’s Christmas Carol with music by Larry Schanker, and for ticket information, visit studio5.dance or call 847-328-6683. For more on Mula, visit tommula.com.