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On Stage: 'Alice's Adventures' goes deep into Lewis Carroll's world
Friday, December 04, 1998 By Christopher Rawson, Post-Gazette Drama Critic
Half the pleasure of "Alice's Adventures Under Ground," the newest exotic fruit of the collaboration between City and SITI - our City Theatre and the inventive national nomads presided over by guru Anne Bogart - is that it takes us back to Lewis Carroll's bottomless classic.
"Alice's Adventures Under Ground"
WHEN: Tues.-Fri. 8 p.m., Sat. 5:30 and 9 p.m., Sun. 2 p.m., through Dec. 20.
TICKETS: $19-$28; 412-431-CITY.
Trite but true. You hear all the time that some adaptation of a masterpiece has the advantage of leading us back to its source. But that's not just what I mean. In the case of Carroll's unique treasure, every visit to any adult version of it is freshly revelatory because it is so endlessly layered and rich in itself. We can never simply return to "Alice" because every time we visit her she is eye-openingly new and enticingly different.
Partly that's because we are different, no doubt, readier more ready to hear something never before noticed.
But as with all its projects, a SITI "Alice" is sui generis beyond even the freshness guaranteed by this source. And that's the other half of the pleasure: The SITI mode, an intense performance discipline seamlessly bonded to a crisp, colorful visual schema. Lights, set pieces, costumes, sound and music are all integrated brushstrokes in an apparently simple, delicately sophisticated talking picture.
Come to think of it, a characteristic SITI project has many similarities to Carroll's work - jokey, punning, mysterious, innocent, psychologically murky ("when we were young and Freudened," someone once said), primal, ironic, complex and enchanting, with a touch of menace.
The current result, a world premiere, is 80 intermissionless minutes, all-"Alice," all-SITI. And the company wears its intellect lightly this holiday time - not that you want to confuse it with your neighborhood "Christmas Carol." No matter what level you approach this "Alice" from, you will be impressed by the efficient, direct and almost naive way it goes right to work to tell its story.
In outline, that story is the familiar one from the first of the "Alice" books, "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland." But the adapter of the text, Ireland's Jocelyn Clarke (a theater critic, no less), used instead the ur-"Alice," the hand-written, illustrated "Alice's Adventures Under Ground" which Charles Dodgson originally gave to young Alice Liddell in 1864 to record the story he had told her extempore on a boating expedition two years earlier.
As Jocelyn says, this was the true expression of love from the eccentric Oxford mathematician to his very young friend. Three years later, doubled in size and by now meant more to be read than heard, it appeared as "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland" under Dodgson's new pseudonym.
Clarke lifts his version of the Mad Hatter's tea party from the published book, but his reliance on its predecessor certainly contributes to that air of oddity and newness I've praised. The linguistic jokes are there, the tangled sexual implications, the sunny playfulness.
Rabbit hole, dark hall, locked door, primal soup (talk about Freudened!), bizarre animals, Caucus Race, Cheshire Cat, tea party, Queen of Hearts, ostrich and hedgehog croquet, Mock Turtle, lobster quadrille, trial of the Knave . . . the well-known elements eventually spiral down to Alice's waking and the delicately bereft Dodgson's gentle farewell.
Dressed in a prim three-piece suit, Jefferson Mays plays every role except Alice. Sometimes, as in the tea party, roles tumble on top of each other but never lose their individuality. But his best creation is the narrator, who has a variety of modes, mostly eager, brisk, modest and confiding. Inevitably he comes to be Dodgson himself, inviting prepubescent Alice to play.
Perky in a white frock, Susan Hightower plays Alice (and, for a bit, the Dormouse). Demure she is, and innocent, perhaps, but post-pubescent and nubile, definitely. Her smile can be read as seductive or mischievous; she glitters with fun, her strong chin making her a force to reckon with when she chooses.
The third "character" is a tall, colorfully-striped box that moves freely, providing a hiding place, platform, corners, ladder, revolve, table or whatever is needed. It comes to have such personality that when its operator emerged to take place in the curtain call, I swear I saw the box lose heart, its personality gone.
Neil Patel's set arranges box, framed pictures of Alice Liddell and Mimi Jordan Sherin's lights around a central circle. Smith's spotlights have a lunar feel and she paints with looming shadows. Darron West and James Schuette provide sound and costumes.
Bogart is the ringleader, of course, but you can't see where one person's work ends and another begins.
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