Alice in 24 At The Mainline Theatre
dense & stage Theatre’s 24-Hour Production
When I walked into the Mainland Theatre, I wasn’t expecting a long line of people waiting to check in. Yet, there I was, standing on the narrow stairs as groups of people came in. Thankfully, the line was moving; slowly, but moving nonetheless. Upstairs, the lobby was packed with a crowd buzzing about the play. Friends who haven’t seen each other in a while reunite for this special moment. 15 minutes later, the doors to the theater open, and I can hear the musicians playing while everyone rushes inside to find a seat. Turns out, it’s a full house. I quickly find the best seat in the house and read the program as I patiently wait for the show to start.
Alice in 24, directed by Abi Sanie, is an adaptation of the 1915 play Alice in Wonderland by Alice Gerstenberg. The 1915 play is a mashup of Lewis Carroll’s children’s novels Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865) and Through the Looking Glass (1871). Alice in Wonderland (1915) has since become part of the public domain–meaning, technically, there isn’t a scriptwriter for Alice in 24. Instead, the dramaturg, Jesse Fildes, edited the script so it was manageable not only for the actors, but also the designers, crew, and other members of the project.
My expectations for the play were low. When you hear a play is going to be produced in 24 hours, quality isn’t the first thing that comes to mind. I was expecting actors to forget every other line, and for background characters to forget simple choreography. What we got was quite the opposite. Leading the cast was Louna Fezoui as Alice, a joy to watch as she brought the kind of naiveté and stubbornness I would expect from the young character.
The director didn’t pressure any of the actors to learn their lines even though the scripts were sent out weeks in advance. Instead, the script was cleverly put into books that the actors could read from. This wasn’t obvious at first. Alice reading out of a book while talking to her uncle, Lewis Carrol (Aaron Delaney), wasn’t out of place. Especially when you consider that they were talking about Alice’s knowledge of chess. This was a clever tactic, but without an overreliance on the books. The Mock Turtle (Corbeau Sandoval) and the Gryphon (Manon Bourgeois) didn’t have books to read off during their scene–clearly, some memorization had been done. Still, once you see it, it gnaws at the back of your head.
The stage was set with many picture frames. There were three on the background with a fabric and two were hanging in the front of the stage. At the start of the play, the two picture frames are laying flat on the ceiling. Alice talks to her uncle Lewis about how there’s another world in the mirror that looks just like ours, except everything is backwards. She enters Wonderland through one of these frames. Once Alice enters Wonderland, the two frames slowly come down. Throughout the play, the characters look out of these picture frames into the audience as a way to break the fourth wall. However, I think they could’ve done a lot more with this, as the play is very self-referential. There’s a lot of jokes about the original Alice and Wonderland (1865) and Alice Through the Looking Glass (1871), but very little interaction between the audience and the cast. This could’ve been a great opportunity to call attention to the fact that nothing in the play was real, or that it was all imagined at the expense of the viewer.
Would this same piece work better had they had more time to rehearse? It’s hard to say. As much as art is about self expression, there’s beauty in restriction. It didn’t hurt that Abi had previously adapted the same script in Texas with a different cast. The assistant director, Masha, told me that there were certain scenes in the play that had to be removed, because they were impossible to recreate especially with the time constraints. Yet, the play kept its same lighthearted pace throughout.
The Red and White queens were a highlight of the show for me. They were so energetic in contrast to Alice, who was clearly the straight man throughout the play. They were played by Augusta Wind and Little Star respectively. Genderfuck and gender fluid characters make perfect sense in a setting like Wonderland. In a place where cats can talk, why not have the King of cards be played by a woman? So, the Red and White queens being played by drag queens somehow feels simple, yet fresh. Their performance incorporated a lot of shade throwing, and word play, which perfectly aligns with Lewis Carrol’s original story.
I think a big mistake people make when adapting Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865) is that they try to insert logic and heavy plot into it. This can work, but rarely does. It’s understandable why someone would attempt to do so, as there are so many ideas introduced in the original story that you could extrapolate on. However, then the whimsy often gets lost. At its core, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865) is a children’s book about a little girl having an adventure in a topsy-turvy world. It doesn’t need a coherent plot or some big life lesson to work. Children, just like adults, deserve media that’s only goal is to entertain, and Alice in 24 does exactly that. Spending the afternoon with these wacky characters was a great way to spend a Sunday.
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