Into a Laughing Hell

By T.E. Kalem

There is no drug quite so powerful as the human imagination--and Lewis Carroll took quite a heady draught before he followed Alice down the rabbit hole. A group of off-Broadway players under the direction of Andre Gregory have now dramatized Alice in Wonderland, and the trip that results is an exciting, absorbing, vertiginous descent into a laughing hell.

The familiar and beloved Alice is here, looking like a slightly tattered Tenniel illustration, and the Mad Hatter, and the Queen of Hearts, and the Cheshire Cat--all the fond friends of generations of children. But in this Alice, the prattling antic chums from childhood cast shadows that are dark, deep and unsettling. The shadows invade the characters and dye them in the colors of Freud, and Jung, and Kafka, and Dali, and Antonin Artaud, who conceived the Theater of Cruelty. Innocence has been lost, assuredly, but a revelation has been gained as the audience is taken on a journey through the murky, quirky labyrinth of the human psyche. Alice is an exemplary instance of how a classic can be made "new," and one of the extremely rare instances of a book's being turned into a wholly satisfactory theatrical experience.

States of Being. The acting company, known as the Manhattan Project, uses techniques somewhat similar to those of the Open Theater (The Serpent, Terminal), though with a far more liberal use of language. The techniques involve sounds, mimicry, a constant awareness of the body in action (without nudity) and an accordion-like expansion or contraction of an episode or scene in order to isolate moving centers of psychological truth. It is selective rather than narrative drama. It does not chronicle an action; it creates states of being and feeling. In Alice, the playgoer encounters states of dread, of sexuality, of absurdity, of bewilderment, of wonder, of fear, of giddiness, of giggliness, of madness, of contraction, of elevation, of "growing pains," of terror, of playfulness, of ecstasy. Simply to turn this catalogue of seeming abstractions into something palpable and concrete and real is a measure of the extraordinary achievement of the play. The players who perform the feat are Gerry Bamman, Tom Costello, Saskia Noordhoek Hegt, Jerry Mayer, Angela Pietropinto and Larry Pine. To single out one would be to slight all.

Words are at the childlike core of Alice in Wonderland, and it is heartening that they have been honored in this production. Words are a child's grandest toy. They are also his first mystery. Even before he understands them, he puts them together and takes them apart. He pops pieces of them into his mouth, and spits them out in odd shapes. It is a profound form of play, for it is the only tool a child is given with which to comprehend a world in which he coexists without really belonging --the world of adults.

All of this is conveyed in Alice, plus something more. Through puns and transpositions of literal and metaphorical imagery, Carroll transformed English into a kind of hallucinatory jabberwocky. Language goes berserk; it refuses to associate with reality. There are moments in Alice when all words seem to have dropped, like leaves, off the tree of meaning, and to be swirling around in gusts of gibberish. This provides one of the closest approximations to going insane that has ever been rendered on a public stage.

A work like Alice in Wonderland is mythic as well as classic. Director Andre Gregory has put his finger on the aspects of myth that pulse in all men. Always a director of flashing and flamboyant resourcefulness, Gregory has now taken a stride in depth. His Alice in Wonderland lays bare the primordial, psychogenetic sources of man's visceral and abiding need for theater.

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