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"Pray don't go there, don't go to America, don't be so dreadfully regardless of yourself!" So warns a character in Martin Chuzzlewit.
But Dickens did go to America...twice, 25 years apart. "How can I tell you what happened from the first day on shore, give you the faintest conception of my welcome there?"
After first describing an appalling initial voyage across the Atlantic, Dickens vividly described his travels across New England and Canada by stagecoach, railway car, canal boat and horseback. Using Dickens' own incisive wit and colorful expressions, Crossley recounts the great novelist's trail from New York to Baltimore "where the ladies--very handsome women with an eastern touch in them--would spit if they passed a northern soldier;" to St. Louis and Washington, "city of intentions;" to Boston and Niagra Falls, "it would be difficult for a man to stand closer to God then he does there;" and many marvelous tales and towns along the way. Act One portrays a 30 year old Dickens following his first visit in 1842. Act Two features an older and wiser Dickens recounting events and personalities he encountered during his triumphant reading tour of 1868. Drawn mostly from his diaries, his collected essays on America, American notes, and contemperary newspaper accounts.
Dickens in America is a tempestuous love affair between the great novelist and the New World told in his own words...compelling, inimitable and extraordinary.
"Dickens in America deserves to run and run, not only in the land of his birth but in the country that provided him with Martin Chuzzlewit and a host of enthralling anecdotes. Steven Crossley, who is fortuitously half American, brings an insight to his role that very few actors could match. Not only is he a dead ringer for Dickens but he is able to mirror the writer's inimitable style without any apparent effort at all. That's acting."
Peter Thompson, Mayfair News, London
"A fabulous show..starring the incomparable Steven Crossley."
Birstol Evening Post
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Steven Crossley trained at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art and began his career with such companies as the acclaimed Shared Experience, the Royal National Theatre and Birmingham Repertory Theatre.
His career has encompassed classical and contemporary theatre, film and television in Britain and America, including: KEEP THE ASPIDISTRA FLYING, PRIME SUSPECT III, INSPECTOR MORSE and CRUEL TRAIN (for BBC2's Screen Two Films.)
American audiences have seen him in notable productions on and off Broadway in New York, and in popular television series.
Coincidentally born in the same city as Dickens (Portsmouth,) Steven spent three seasons in Washington, DC. playing Ebeneezer Scrooge, a role which he reprised in both 2000 and 2001 productions there. It was upon receiving an invitation to read Dickens immortal A CHRISTMAS CAROL before a White House audience that he decided to collabaorate with playwright Nigel Gearing to develop a show about Dickens' two journeys to and through America.
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