It never ceases to tickle me that one of the greatest tracts of nonsense (bona fide, not derogatory), Lewis Carroll’s 1865 Alice in Wonderland, has been one of the greatest subjects to help bring sense to our sense. It’s been the subject of endless adaptations—literary, for film and television, has served as a simplistic allegory for the endless struggle between chaos and domination (cf. The Matrix), and has even given way to some of the most mind-numbing theory I’ve ever come across. (I love Gilles with all my heart, but The Logic of Sense is just brutal.) I’ve seen numerous theatrical adaptations of Alice, from children’s theatre to, not surprisingly, burlesque. We can only hope the franchise is at least partially recuperated by Tim Burton’s film, slated to open next year.
To kick of
this year’s Ice Factory at the Ohio, the Anonymous Ensemble has taken on the
story with their own twist in A
Wonderland—a middle-aged Alice as failed superstar, relegated to a
cookie-cutter cabaret act. The
piece confuses boudaries as it should, between real and fictive audiences,
between characters, between diegetic and extra-diegetic realities. It perhaps most disappointing that the
script explicitly distances this Alice from the literary one; the cabaret
singer is well versed in the novel, and goes along with the journey
knowingly. At first, however, she
is very confused when her act is commandeered by a drag queen rabbit, who sings
a delightful ditty about the many ways to explore her “hole.”
And many of the corresponding characters are fleshed out wonderfully by a cavorting cast: most notably our campy and lost heroine (Janelle Lannan), the apparently strung-out producer of Wonderland, Dormouse (Liz Davito), and a Mad Hatter by the way of Ziggy Stardust (Josh Hoglund). Even the Caterpillar, played by an ensemble of black-lit toys is beautiful and hilarious. All the usual suspects drag Alice around a Wonderland of, in this case, missed opportunities and what-could-have-beens. In Wonderland, Alice is powerful and famous; of course, in the nonsense of Wonderland, these qualities mean little, and so Alice is doomed to the same repetition and loss of meaning as in the real world. So when Alice faces the ten-foot-tall Queen of Hearts in a game of Hold ’Em, she’s just as doomed to lose.
The music is also quite wonderful. Composer William Antoniou and lyricist-director Eamonn Farrell have weaved a solid line of songs throughout, with topics ranging from sex to grad school to neo-Buddhist philosophy. Even Alice’s torch-song is quite touching.
The trees are the key to the Anonymous Ensemble’s performance, wonderful and charming trees at that, but the forest seems sacrificed in the wake. I wrote about The Best a couple years back, and the group still struggles with its own identity as a “multimedia” performance group. Of course Alice’s desire for fame could be projected on a TV screen, and these days that type of visibility is an all-too easy shorthand for celebrity. But instead of taking advantage of the unlimited potential of a Wonderland television network, the projections add a bit of trippiness to the performance at best. And then, there was the technical malfunction mid-show. In Carroll’s Wonderland—how delicious! The screen disappears from sight, as do the actors, but we know all the meaning is still resonating. Tweed’s inner-voice squealed with glee—“It’s a technological Cheshire Cat!” Unfortunately, tech crew members were rushing to and fro, and the cast gallantly covered instead of celebrating the joy and vitality in chaos. It seems so out of character for Wonderland. Along with the trail of aesthetic missteps that have tried to work with Alice in Wonderland in the past, the Anonymous Ensemble seems overly committed to the logic of nonsense as well.
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