Events Feedback
New This WeekAround TownMusicFilmArtTheaterNews & FeaturesFood & DrinkAstrology
  HOME
NEW THIS WEEK
EDITORS' PICKS
LISTINGS
NEWS & FEATURES
MUSIC
FILM
ART
BOOKS
THEATER
DANCE
TELEVISION
FOOD & DRINK
ARCHIVES
LETTERS
PERSONALS
CLASSIFIEDS
ADULT
ASTROLOGY
PHOENIX FORUM DOWNLOAD MP3s

  E-Mail This Article to a Friend
Christmas Carroll
Alice goes back to Wonderland
BY LIZA WEISSTUCH

Peter Pan may be the boy who refuses to grow up, but what ever became of Alice once she returned from Wonderland and outgrew her patent-leather shoes? Underground Railway Theater has a theory to offer in Alice’s Adventures Underground, which premiered in 1998 and will be performed at the Cambridge Family YMCA starting next week. In the troupe’s retelling of the Lewis Carroll classics Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass, we meet Alice as a grown woman. Exhausted by her daughter, Carol (wink!), Alice slips through the mirror, a symbol of concern about aging and time passing, and takes off on a madcap, surreal adventure that ushers her through a process of self-realization.

"Lewis Carroll was a victim of Victorian mentality in a lot of ways," explains URT artistic director Debra Wise, who adapted the work and herself plays Alice. "His books to me are so much a satire of the adult perspective on life. It seemed, then, an obvious take on the books for us. We could have done the books as they are, but we wanted to find our own take that would be honest yet would be an exegesis of the books. We wanted to make a play that would resonate on all levels."

Sure, we’ve all been amused by theories about those funky mushrooms Alice munches (an angle Jefferson Airplane endorsed with its psychedelic anthem "White Rabbit"), but Carroll’s imagery has inspired plenty of other analyses. Wise, who has read the Alice books annually since she was eight, is familiar with the many interpretations and adaptations, but she explains URT’s version with such sound rationality that you wonder how any other was ever considered. Take Alice’s discovery that the world behind the looking glass is backwards. "Alice has to run as fast as she can to stay in one place. I mean, what kind of metaphor is that for contemporary life?"

So when Wise sat down with Wes Sanders, with whom she founded URT, and company members, they decided to chronicle the adventures of an adult Alice. She encounters all the same characters; they’re recognizable from the books or, for that matter, from the Disney animation, but they register on a level that appeals to adult sensibilities.

"All the characters she meets are in some way fractured mirrors of herself as a parent," Wise says of Alice. "Carroll was certainly satirizing authority figures in Victorian family life, as well as political life in England. We just put it into a family geography and use it as a lens through which to look at relationships between parent and child and the internal debate about identity, like where does my identity end and my kid’s begin?"

But all that hardly undercuts the story’s fantasy element. The ensemble, an intergenerational crew that features Wise, two men (one of whom plays Carroll himself), and five children in multiple roles, uses puppets to bring non-human characters to life. Puppets are actually fundamental to the company’s æsthetic: since its founding in 1978, URT, which is in residence at Arlington Center for the Arts and now tours its shows nationally, has chosen them as a way to expand the limits of actors in performance.

To enhance Alice’s transportive effect, Underground commissioned a score by Roger Miller, who’s best known as Mission of Burma’s guitarist and singer. But the music is inspired less by Miller’s punk roots than by his experience in the Alloy Orchestra, which creates and performs live soundtracks for silent films. "The music is a way to divide up time, as opposed to being in the moment," Wise explains. "It punctuates the action on stage. To that effect, it’s more in the tradition of vaudeville or circus." The score corresponds with her underlying view of Carroll’s quirkiness: "Imaginations just want to have fun."

Alice’s Adventures Underground runs December 20 through 29 at Durrell Hall, in the Cambridge Family YMCA, 820 Massachusetts Avenue in Central Square. Tickets are $12.50 for adults, $9.50 for children; call (781) 643-6916.


Issue Date: December 12 - 19, 2002
Back to the Editors' Picks table of contents.