Wanderland takes student theater down the rabbit hole

It’s unusual that falling down a rabbit hole and traveling to a new country for college are thrust alongside each other in the same theater, yet Wanderland pairs these experiences in two pieces that complement, rather than contradict, each other in their themes of exploration. The senior thesis projects for Theater & Performance Studies majors, individually titled Golden Shards and Chiaroscuro, take stories familiar to all and muddle the formula to create hybrid narratives. The result is a conglomerate of fairy tale and memoir that blurs the line between fantasy and reality, nationality and identity.

Golden Shards, the thesis project from Alice Cash (COL’13), delves into the classic tale of Alice in Wonderland and layers it with the backstory of the author himself while examining his evolution from Charles Dodgson to Lewis Carroll. His development as an author and his relationship with Alice Liddell become the foreground of the tale as snippets of his life are interspersed with scenes from the fantastical literature that was his legacy.

Some of the play’s strongest scenes consist of Dodgson addressing the audience, musing on the nature of insanity or time. However, Cash’s play avoids relying too heavily on monologue. In truth, it is a masterfully designed collage of chronologically disordered scenes from the author’s life that transition into related excerpts from Alice in Wonderland as seamlessly as one would drift into sleep.

The completed work is an undeniable homage to the author, yet it’s also an artful insight into the way that the quotidian feeds into the absurd. Like Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead, it is a kind of remix that forces the audience to reexamine a familiar work under a new light.

To accomplish this delicate task, Cash relied heavily on letters, biographies, and Dodgson’s own works during the writing process. As the play took shape on stage, however, it took on a vibrancy only theatrical collaboration could allow.

“It definitely took a life of its own off the paper, as it was a work of collaboration with the actors and designers,” Cash said. “The performance is all about ‘play,’ about being children, about exploring the adventures of life.”

This theme becomes apparent throughout the performance, in addition to the overarching idea that dreams are woven into the fabric of memory. The linear nature of time comes into question as screen projections of biographical dates and photographs underscore the simultaneous significance and limits of history, while imagination is left to fill the gaps.

In Chiaroscuro, Swedian Lie (COL’13) explores similar distinctions, though in the form of a semi-autobiographical narrative. Relying heavily on the visual power of the exotic set and the movements of the actors onstage, Lie explores his own journey as a Chinese-Indonesian immigrant through an inquiry into the nature of identity.

As a Studio Art major, Lie brought a unique approach to the writing process. Unlike Cash, whose play was born out of the significance of text, he sought alternative methods to communicate his story.

“I write almost open-word or poetry as opposed to dialogue,” he said. “That in itself is a very different kind of approach.”

Almost the first 10 minutes of  the play, in fact, included no dialogue at all, but a series of symbolic movements and interpretive dance. Though this is an intriguing strategy, it leaves the audience more than a little confused about its message.

When Lie finally speaks, it is about the concept of his name and the role of Chinese calligraphy in his life, using brush painting on stage as a unique device to literally illustrate the fundamental elements of his background.

This emphasis on the visual is the defining characteristic of the play, whose title refers to the contrast between light and dark. Furthermore, it made the transition from paper to stage a transformative process, for both the play and Lie himself.

“In a way, so much of the script changed during production, and I’m a big advocate of that in the sense that the work should evolve all the time,” he said. “As I’ve been working on this project, I’ve grown more comfortable with feeling a sense of ambiguity in my own identity because that’s a lifetime journey.”