"Lookingglass Alice' at Arden

Alice in Wonderland
meets Toys 'R' Us

ROBERT ZALLER

Charles Lutwidge Dodgson went through a kind of linguistic looking-glass himself to arrive at his famous nom de plume, translating his first two names into Latin as “Carolus Lodovicus” and then re-Anglicizing and reversing them as Lewis Carroll. The actual Dodgson was a mathematician, photographer and child fancier (not to be confused with its Latin translation, pedophile), who was fond of a girl named Alice Liddell, daughter of the dean of Christ Church. To amuse Alice and her playmates, he wrote the quite unclassifiable exercises in literary imagination called Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass, thanks to which the young girl became better known than Queen Victoria. Such were the days.

The Lookingglass Theatre Company has a reverse-mirror relationship itself to the Arden Theatre Company, which hosts its current production of Lookingglass Alice. Both companies were formed in 1988 by drama students at Northwestern University, and they’ve maintained fraternal relations ever since. The Arden has thrived on relatively conventional fare; Lookingglass, by contrast, is an actors’ theater that adapts classics as spectacle. Lookingglass Alice, a signature piece, adapts both of Carroll’s Alice works, with bits of his “nonsense” poems, The Hunting of the Snark and Jabberwocky, thrown in.

Actors’ theater, or circus?

Actors’ theater, a very liberating force when Grotowski and others developed it in Poland and brought it west in the 1960s, combined dramaturgy with the physical expressiveness of modern dance. But it’s been around for some decades now, and these days it competes with the computer effects of comic book cinema, its debased and evil twin. Some companies, like Pig Iron, take a more nuanced view, integrating physical spectacle into dramatic structure. Lookingglass Alice, however, is really circus, with explosive sound and light effects, and great derring-do on catwalks, ropes and swings.

The question is what this does for, or to, Lewis Carroll. Carroll’s texts are a unique combination of gossamer and steel; that is, they can stand a lot of stress, but for whatever is gained in the process, something is also lost. The five-member cast of Alice, doubling roles with the exception of Lauren Hirte’s Alice, is wonderfully plastic and inventive, and the acrobatic feats of all are impressive. Alice herself, who alone remains in character, eventually gets literally into the swing of things, before being awarded the dubious crown of queen at the end. There’s pathos in this, for it represents not only Alice’s full certification in fantasyland, but also the impending tragedy of adulthood: to be a queen, after all, is to be frozen into final identity, and forced to rule.

A fundamental problem

Melding Carroll’s texts, however, sacrifices their integrity, and reduces the experience of the literary Alice— a brave pioneer, like all children, in a world she never made— into that of a naïve voyeur surrounded by the stunts of play-acting grownups. That is to say, there’s something vaguely consumerist about this Alice; we are reminded, as by a visit to Toys “R” Us, of the efforts of the kiddie market to replace childhood imagination with saleable products that mimic it. This is all the more problematic in that the production is aimed, of course, at an adult audience (though a program note says that it is suitable as well for children ten and up).

The genius of Carroll’s texts is that they can be fully comprehended and appreciated by children and adults alike, on entirely different levels. Children will sense but not understand the adult world that lies beyond Carroll’s fantasy world; adults will recall their own childish perplexity and wonder in that of Alice, without being able to experience it again. There’s a fundamental problem, though, in trying to offer a Lewis Carroll who appeals seamlessly to all ages at once. This production, for all its faultless athleticism and grace, falls between two stools.