Magic 'Alice'
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Company members mentioned in this article: David Catlin, Tony Hernandez, Lauren Hirte, Larry DiStasi, Doug Hara and Anthony Fleming III by Jack Helbig Eighteen years ago, a group of Northwestern University acting students who worked unusually well together put on a university production of Andre Gregory's adaptation of "Alice in Wonderland." Full of intense physical movement, the production is often cited by the folks at Lookingglass Theatre Company as the show that solidified the idea of forming an ensemble after graduation. They even took the name Lookingglass in honor of "Alice" and of that fateful production. So it is fitting that the company would eventually tackle Lewis Carroll's other "Alice" book, "Alice Through the Lookingglass." And also fitting that they would create such a lovely, inspired, graceful work from that text. The adaptation by founding member David Catlin, who also directs, honors the spirit of Carroll's odd, brilliant, playful book. Even stranger than Carroll's first book, "Through the Lookingglass" is packed with references to chess and non-Euclidean geometry (Carroll was a minister and a mathematician when he wasn't a children's author) and does not immediately lend itself easily to a linear plot line. On the other hand, the book contains a surfeit of memorable characters, among them the Red Queen ("Off with their heads"), the White Knight, the Cheshire Cat and the kind of extremely entertaining wordplay that we associate with writers like James Joyce , Gertrude Stein and Vladimir Nabokov. In turning part of the book into a play, Catlin has created a fascinating framing device, based in part on a real-life Alice's relationship with the real-life Lewis Carroll (aka Rev. Charles Lutwidge Dodson ). Both Alice books were written by Dodson to memorialize his fond relationship with Alice, who was his neighbor, and the many stories he would tell her when she was a little girl. That parental love is suffused throughout this production, as is the realization that Alice is growing up. Both books are packed with transformation imagery that can be taken to represent the changes all children go through as they grow from babies to young men and women. But Catlin's adaptation points out how full of references to growth, aging and death "Lookingglass" is. For instance, Alice clearly grows older over the course of the book while The White Queen turns from an elderly woman to an infant. She lives her life backward, you understand, because everyone in the Lookingglass world does things backward. This reoccurring theme of Alice growing up and learning about life in the Lookingglass world gives a subtle unity to a production that could have been just an episodic series of scenes. But it isn't the only unifying element. Catlin freely uses circus arts to create stage equivalents of the wild dreamlike imagery. The Red Queen, for example, is played by real-life circus performer Tony Hernandez, on stilts in a long red dress that is literally two stories tall. Alice, too, is played by an accomplished practitioner of the circus arts, Lauren Hirte, last seen here in Lookingglass's highly acrobatic adaptation of Charles Dickens "Hard Times." Once again Hirte's athletic grace is shown to best effect as she leaps and rolls and, most impressively, dangles again and again high above the crowd once in a ring, another time from a long ribbon of fabric. Also in the cast are Lawrence E. DiStasi, co-founder of the circus arts school, The Actor's Gymnasium, and himself an amazing acrobat, Doug Hara, who routinely leaps and tumbles through productions he appears in, and Anthony Fleming III, not (yet) known for his acrobatic ability but an athletic actor who can run, leap and clown with the best of them. This production is so full of glorious circus moments you would be forgiven for thinking you were watching some low-budget version of Cirque du Soleil. In fact, if the Cirque folks were smart, they would license this adaptation and use it for the spine of one of their extravaganzas. But, of course, Catlin never loses the thread of the story, or sacrifices it to pack in one more odd circus act, the way the trippy Cirque folks do. Instead, all the circus stuff furthers the story - Alice's journey through the Lookingglass world and her repeated attempts to become queen and symbolically, at least, get home. Thanks to Catlin's intelligent, sensitive production, we are with Alice every step of her journey, laughing with her at all the odd people she meets, and sharing her shock when things occasionally turn dark and troubling, as when Humpty Dumpty takes his great fall. What is most remarkable about this production, though, is that it, like the original novel, works as both as a show for adults and children (above the age of 5 or so). Children will be delighted by all the amazing acrobatics and the physical comedy, as will adults. But we adults also get Catlin's moving subtext: that we all grow up, we all leave the wondrous playful world of childhood behind and part of parenthood is watching someone else first experience and then leave that wonderful Lookingglass world behind. |
