Underground With Madness
Christopher Hampton’s Alice’s Adventures Under Ground
Mad Hatters and March Hares
City Lit Theater has spent nearly one-third of a century (a very long time indeed) “dedicated to the vitality and accessibility of the literary imagination.” In keeping with that part of its mission statement, City Lit is currently treating us to the Chicago premier of Alice’s Adventures Underground, a romp through the unlikely slapstick world created by Lewis Carroll for his favorite muse, Alice Liddell. Audience looking for a stage adaptation of Carroll’s best-known works for children, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass and What Alice Found There, will be disappointed. The play most certainly does not attempt to recreate the contents of the books. Rather, it is a play about the relationship between Carroll and Liddell and attempts to imagine the creative process that gave us these timeless and charming children’s stories.
The play opens innocently enough with Alice paying a visit on Carroll in his Victorian drawing room. It quickly slips over the edge into fantasy as the unforgettable characters begin to flow from Carroll’s imagination to fill the world of Alice. Alice interacts with the characters as though they were real and in the process invites the audience into the magical world of the White Rabbit, The Mad Hatter, The Doormouse and all the others that populate the books. Throughout the play the audience’s conscious is repeatedly escorted from reality to fantasy and back again as Alice experiences the flights of fancy that so entertained and fascinated her. In fact, this technique of “crossing over” between the real world and the imaginary is one that Carroll also employed to great effect in another of his children’s novels, Bruno and Sylvie.
At one point, the eighty-five minute production takes a short detour into some darker material that explores the nineteenth century practice of photographing nude children. While this was common practice for the time, the twentieth century discovery of some photographs taken by Carroll of nude children raised immediate questions regarding the propriety of his relationship with Alice Liddell. Scholars have since debunked such concerns, yet it is evidence that we, as contemporary members of society, have yet to completely understand and accept the intimate relationships of that romantic era that don’t exactly conform to our own notions of sterile morality.
Thus Hampton’s play leaves us with a strangely clouded vision of mid-nineteenth century life which by all accounts was a period of intense emotions and strong personal attachments. At the same time, we feel great nostalgia for those parts of the culture we can accept without effort. This mixture of mild precaution and attractive romanticism accompanies the audience as they leave the performance, perhaps with visions of their own childhoods and what they may have experienced or not experienced during those halcyon days of youth so long ago.
Changing Roles
The entire five-person cast is called upon to play multiple roles. Even Emily Garman, the talented young actress who portrays Alice so effectively, is called upon to become an oyster at one point. The remaining actors all assume a range of Carroll’s book characters ranging from five to eight in number. There are no costume changes, but the acting is at a high level and Carroll’s archetypes leave little doubt as to the identities of the characters as they sweep in and out of Alice’s imagination through a variety of clever entrances and exits built into the set.
Emily Garman’s fine work has already been mentioned. She was required to be sometimes sweet, sometimes frightened and sometimes petulant but always a bright and energetic seven-and-one-half-year-old. Kudos to Emily.
Nick Lake likewise had his hands full as he switched from Lewis Carroll, the clever inventor of Children’s fantasy to a more serious monolog dealing with the photographs of nude children mentioned earlier. In between, he effectively portrayed nine of the Carroll characters for the delight and amusement of the audience.
Likewise, LeeWichman, Edward Kuffert and Morgan McCabe all put forth outstanding performances as they deftly switched from one insane character to another in the twinkling of an eye. Especially noteworthy were McCabes portrayal of the Duchess and her pig baby along with Kuffert’s portrayal of the Cook in the same scene. Lee Wichman’s Mock Turtle was nothing short of brilliant.
Production
Ray Blackburn’s set design, while it may have appeared to be a “normal” Victorian drawing room was anything but. Clever secret entrances allowed the actors to appear and disappear in ways that reinforced the fantasy and magical experience of the world Carroll created in his books. The looking glass over the mantle was a nice touch that permitted us to wonder just how much of all of this was real, and how much might have been imaginary.
Worthy of mention is Devon Carroll’s lighting design that gave us a simulated flash powder experience, Tom Kieffer’s costume design that had just the right amount of extravagance to elevate us to the fantasy and yet remain firmly anchored in Victorian England.
Also notable were Richard Peaslee’s original songs that set some of Carroll’s poetry to music. The songs added yet another surreal touch to the entire production that left us wandering between here and now and then and somewhere imaginary.
Do You Remember
If you remember Lewis Carroll’s books fondly; if you read them as a child, or if they were read to you; if you read the books recently as I just happened to do for no apparent reason, then you will probably find great pleasure and satisfaction in this fine production. You will be transported to a land you may have only dreamed of on a long-ago afternoon; you will experience once again the magic of a world that knows little restraint and that celebrates the unexpected and outrageous. You will, in short, become a child again, even if for only about an hour and a half.
This is a recommended production for all ages. Alice’s Adventures Under Ground is at City Lit Theater through October 9, 2011.
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