The Economist praises Then She Fell, an adaptation of Alice in Wonderland that blurs boundaries between spectator and participant:
Staged in the creaking, intimate rooms of the Kingsland Ward at St John’s [in Brooklyn], “Then She Fell” provides the illusion of free-range exploration even as it carefully ushers and shepherds its explorers. All the elusiveness and illusiveness you would expect from the world of smoking caterpillars and rogue playing cards, but in a surprisingly cohesive package. Visitors variously find themselves perusing the contents of drawers and file cabinets, observing breakneck dance sequences, brushing Alice’s hair, gulping down watered-down alcoholic drinks and trying on headgear with a Mad Hatter, all the while piecing together the fragments of a story—sometimes literally, as with the scraps of a torn-up love letter. That story revolves around Lewis Carroll, the author of “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland”, and his child-friend Alice Liddell, the model for his story’s innocent heroine. Inspired by historical speculation and incriminating evidence—the Liddell family abruptly cut contact with Carroll and pages of his diaries were removed, for example—the production surmises that, for Carroll, Alice may not only have been a muse, but an unhealthy obsession.
“Then She Fell” does what the best retellings set out to do: it offers a new framework through which to contemplate a familiar story. It may be too much to say that after watching it you’ll never see “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland” the same way again, but at last Carroll’s creations felt curiouser and curiouser once again.
In a review of the show last year, Tara Isabella Burton offered another glimpse into the experience:
Audience members are separated and ushered into different spaces (commanded, by an imperious looking nurse, not to open any closed doors), led in threes, twos, and finally solo into various, increasingly intimate, scenes with Carroll’s novels’ most famous denizens, and with the tormented Carroll himself. (Not all audience members are allowed to witness all scenes – as I realized with some disappointment, as I spotted the Hatter’s tea party taking place in a room I was not permitted to enter). Each audience member’s experience, [co-director and performer Zach] Morris tells me, is structured: though we each view scenes in different orders, in a non-linear fashion, our own emotional arc is tightly choreographed: as we, scene by scene, are invited to develop our own stories of nostalgia and loss. Thus did I follow one of the two Alices (one, a note in the Hatter’s room hints, for each side of the looking glass), into a room with an empty mirror frame, through which I served as her reflection. Thus did I follow the White Rabbit into a closet of of freshly-painted white roses, watching him perform a virtuosic – and unsettlingly close by – dance with a butcher’s knife. Thus – ultimately – did I piece together these fragments of the Kingsland Ward’s take on Wonderland, and invented for them – in the absence of linear narrative – my own story.
That, hints Morris, is precisely the point.
The show runs through December 28th in Brooklyn.
The Dish 