November 2006
Theater
By Shamrock McShane

Wonder This

There is no good reason to see Alice in Wonderland at the Hipp this month. Just lots and lots of bad reasons. Very very bad reasons, and all of them appealing directly to the sensory appetite, filling the mind with a madness of desire, hurtling it from pleasure to pain like a living croquet ball. You will lose your head!

The philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein determined that a combination of words is nonsensical when it cannot possibly be understood. That's because no sense can be, except trivially, accorded it or derived from it. It cuts both ways.

What¹s the point? The point of a needle perhaps. Wittgenstein theorized that nonsense can be used like a vaccine to cure us of itself.

Here's another metaphor, the one that is employed in this production of the Anne Coulter Martens adaptation of the story written by the mathematician Charles Dodgson under the name Lewis Carroll. Nonsense is a ladder that you can use to climb into sense and then toss down once you get there.

Nonsense takes on the form of something like madness. Alice's world is mad, and Alice is its victim. This puts her in exactly the same position as, say, a philosopher.

"The philosopher," Wittgenstein said, "is a man who has to cure himself of many sicknesses of understanding before he can arrive at the notions of the sound human understanding. If in the midst of life we are surrounded by death, so in sanity we are surrounded by madness."

And now for the madness of Lauren Caldwell. Her reputation precedes her. At the gala opening night, many theatergoers arrive in risqué costumes themselves, and carry their drinks to their seats, in anticipation of sensory delights.

With one notable exception, the ensemble is all–female. The director, as I say, is Lauren Caldwell, worth pointing out again for the gender–conscious. Surely a male director would never get away with this, because what these broads are about to do will take your breath away.

A lady in a blue dress dangles from a ladder above the stage. Don¹t worry; she isn't real. Is she? What is real? What is reality?

A child's voice greets us in the darkness, promoting Alice Special Drinks at the bar. Before we can ponder its perversity, lights up. This must be Alice.

No beating around the bush. Three uses of the knife. Expressionistic. Performance art wedded to narrative.

They strip Alice and dress her. And you know it is going to happen again somehow in reverse at the end. So there's definitely something to look forward to.

It is a play for everyone. Not kids of course. My God, it¹d warp them worse than, well, as badly as, video games, or even the mall. But everyone one else — I mean, who doesn't want to see a bunch of beautiful women in a madness of desire?

Oh, I'm sorry. You don't. What's wrong with you? Haven't you heard? Theater is a collaborative art — bend over.

Sara Morsey, slyly, is the Cheshire Cat, called Chessie, no less lascivious than your pet, but given to that grin, signifying nothing, and so she does represent the way out of madness, if only that were possible — to remove the nonsense from sense.

Alice is a woman, not a girl, in fact, she's a big busty bombshell, the sensational Kelly Atkins. And she finds herself in the erotic rituals of a B–movie, asking: Who in the world am I? The problematic part being the world, because there is no I. There can't be if I keep changing every instant, along with everything else.

To dance a crazed and comical bloody knife dance, as does Catherine Fries Vaughn, is perhaps to ward off our community's deepest fears. That is what ritual is for.

"Everything¹s got a moral."

The Queen of Hearts hovers malevolently over the action. And the action can't seem to find a rhythm. The choices are eclectic. The sound patterns and the stage pictures keep you continually off balance.

Chop logic. The tea party turns into a votary of nuns. The worship of illogic extols the demerits of beating time. Time doesn't like it, and strikes back. Ring around the Rosie, the tune rising on the air, out of key, and fading away.

The staging takes a Busby Berkely erotic turn, with a nod to the Rockettes, and finally there is the long–awaited arrival of the Queen of Hearts, played by Elizabeth Taylor as played by Mark Chambers. And the game is up.

We don't care about Alice in the usual way we care about a protagonist. We care about her the way, say, the Marquis De Sade would care about her, saying soothingly, "Your body is yours alone; you are the only person in the world who has a right to take pleasure from it and to permit whoever you will to get pleasure from it."

We are the voyeurs who watch Alice disappear into herself. Have fun.