Review: Alice! at the Vortex [theater]

For those of you that didn't have a childhood (or a subversive high school English teacher), the story is basically this: Alice, bored during her sister's droning tutorial, spies a white rabbit in a cute little outfit racing into a hole. She follows him and finds herself in a subterrainian wonderland replete with condescending flora, a cryptic hooka-smoking bug, and a queen whose policy it is to behead the non-obsequious (like you do). She goes back in the second book. More shit happens. It's a dream (or is it?). Great books. Read them.

The challenge to create something fresh and piquing was bound to be, from the offset, grueling; adaptations of Lewis Carrol's best loved works are so common as to have become a sub-genre. The over-literal "she's fucking batshit" angle, with all its supported metaphors, take-able licenses, and typical ignorance of reference to governmental fallacies has been explored variously. An addition to the canon that attempts to combine the two stories and make them converse in this context sets the bar at a respectably high level. However, all the leaping and grasping this production does causes the bar to fall on its head and give it a concussion. It is, as the young folk say, a "hot damned mess".

The piece is jarring, but it rarely works in the manner the orchestrators ostensibly intended. Inexplicably, several scenarios and characters have been removed, most surprisingly the ones that would've provided great nuthouse metaphors and a prickly fluidity (the "Eat Me, Drink Me" situation, the Pool of Tears ordeal, the Mock Turtle, the Walrus, the Carpenter, etc.). It seems as if the company's primary goal is to induce empathy with Alice's burgeoning insanity by deluging the audience with confounding lighting choices, frenetic scene changes, and interaction in the form of breath on necks and pinching of sides. One is being commanded, rather than invited, to follow, which results in audience recalcitrance. Judging by the sporadic deriding snickers during blackouts, the shifting in seats, and a susurration of "Oh, fuck me" from one slumped young man, the play only successfully induced apathy and aggravation in several audience members. And maybe headaches from the copious screaming.

Playing crazy is a challenge in most stage endeavors, and one that Alice! fails to overcome. The piece gets snared on the notion that "crazy" entails screaming a lot and tearing at one's hair while blathering nonsensically. If 60 Minutes exposés have taught us anything, it's that this isn't entirely untrue, but crazy on-stage is different from actual crazy, as it requires moderation and precision to be convincing. Many performers plummet headlong into the pit of mawkishness and hyperbolic "wackiness".

A few, however, adroitly skirt the void. Natalie Navar and Sabrina Olivia glint as twin shards Tweedledee and Tweedledum, marrying high theatricality with a contorted believability, and the unnamed-in-the-program dude that plays the Cheshire Cat offers a refreshing glee to the proceedings. Periodically, Alexa Doggett's Alice sears with a piquant sincerity that seems to be thwarted often by direction and circumstance. While these performers add a welcome weight to the proceedings, they eventually leave the stage and the audience is vaulted back into the maddening tangle to fend for themselves. Considering the gallumphing nature of the beastly ideas that inhabit it, this tuldgey wood is better left unexplored.