The Dish

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.

Wesley Hill laments that “intimate, vowed forms of Christian friendship” have been consigned to “the rubbish heap of history” – that friendship lacks the permanence and formal commitment of marriage::

In the ancient East up until today, a rite exists—adelphopoiesis, “brother-making”—in which friends make promises to each other and solidify their commitment by sharing in the Eucharist. (Although it was primarily men who exchanged these vows, the rite was open to women as well.) In the West, 12th-century English writer Aelred of Rievaulx upheld a similar ideal. Speaking primarily of friendships between monks, Aelred writes that we call such people friends “to whom we have no qualm about entrusting our heart and all its contents.” But he goes further: “See how far love between friends should extend; namely, that they be willing to die for one another,” unmistakably echoing Jesus. Dying for one’s friends is the apex of love.

We might want to write off Aelred’s vision of “spiritual friendship” as pious idealism. But his model of devoted friendship bore noticeable fruit. In the centuries following his death, pairs of Christian friends were buried together to signal their love. Looking forward to the bodily resurrection of the dead, the shared tombs ensured for each friend that “the first figure his awakened eyes will see will be [the other friend],” notes historian Alan Bray. With that belief, 19th-century Catholic John Henry Newman was buried next to fellow cleric Ambrose St. John. After St. John’s death, Newman lamented, “I have ever thought no bereavement was equal to that of a husband’s or a wife’s, but I feel it difficult to believe that any can be greater, or any one’s sorrow greater, than mine.”

Matthew Lee Anderson hesitates at this, suggesting that friendship, as a form of love, is distinctive in transcending obligation and duty:

[I]t’s possible to think that friendships do not have or need vows because they are a lesser form of union, and that the lack of public recognition is tied to their weakness. It is also possible, though, that explicit vows and promises create obligations, and that friendship moves us into a realm beyond these. The high point of the Gospels, in my opinion, is the moment when Jesus tells his disciples that they are no longer disciples, but that they are now friends. I’m not prepared to speak of the obligations on God which exist because of the covenant established with man in creation: but it is clear that even if there were obligations, they could not possibly include that. Nor does it seem right to me that such a moment could generate obligations the ways that vows unquestionably do: what duty could bind Jesus’ friendship with us? What obligation might provide the shape to the unmerited gift of his grace? To be friends with God is to participate in a form of charity which is not incompatible with vows per se—lest we deny marriages any form of participation in it as well—but the vow-less, obligation-free character of friendship illuminates the unrestrained nature of charity in a way that a life mediated by vows and promises might not.