T. Charles Erickson Photos
Ellis.
A mad hatter. Skating on thin ice. A man with two faces, condemned to hell. Alice, the show theater director Robert Wilson and musical artist Tom Waits adapted from Lewis Carroll’s surreal children’s story Alice in Wonderland, has almost never been performed in the U.S. Thanks to Logan Ellis, a third-year director in the Yale School of Drama, New Haven will get its chance to see it when Alice runs at the University Theater from Feb. 1 through Feb. 7.
For Ellis, interest in Alice began in childhood. Ellis’s father, a musician, had the album Alice by Waits, released in 2002, and Ellis recalled it “eerily playing in the living room.” His father gave him a piano reduction of the score, and it was only later that Ellis began to wonder about the fact that the songs on the record “came out of a play.” Nothing on the album indicated that the songs, in many cases, are sung by analogues to Carroll’s characters.
Alice was originally produced in Hamburg in 1992, The play, Ellis discovered when he sought it out for possible production, consists of a 30-page script by Paul Schmidt that Ellis described as a “loosely composed” collection of poetry, song lyrics, speeches, and references to the famous creations by Lewis Carroll — pen name of Charles Dodgson — and to Alice Liddell, an inspiration for the fictional Alice and a model for photographs, including nudes, taken by Dodgson during her adolescence. The relationship between Dodgson and Liddell, which has caused much conjecture, is the subject of the play by Wilson, Waits and Schmidt.
Ellis was attracted by the fact that there was little to go on from previous productions, calling the script “an expansive road map” and “a rich invitation for student artists to stage.” New plays often have their content dictated by their authors. Ellis has been gratified in the way that Alice has “taken on the interests of everyone involved,” making the show a fully collaborative production.
Wilson’s work is probably best known for being unpredictably avant-garde; he tends to use “extreme slow motion,” Ellis said, and to prefer the visual to the verbal. Ellis said there was no pressure on him to follow a “Wilsonite” approach, and feels he has “taken the show in a different direction” and that the play as scripted invites such a treatment.
A distinction Ellis drew between more traditional musicals and Alice is that songs in musicals are typically motivated by the plot, giving a song a specific purpose. Alice, Ellis said, is like “a musical inside out,” so that the songs determine how a character should be conceived and staged. With second-year scenic designer Anna Grigo, Ellis has been working to evolve a space for Wilson’s Dreamland — the script never uses the term “wonderland.”
“The space is Alice’s mind and her memory of the characters in Carroll’s stories,” Ellis said.
Sam Else.
Logan with Projection Designer Brittany Bland and actor Sola Fadiran as Charles Dodgson.
Familiar elements of the Alice stories — such as Alice’s tendency to grow bigger and smaller depending on what she eats and drinks — has required, Ellis said, “pushing the technical team to accomplish the unprecedented.” As Grigo said, that “demanded trusting our instincts, with the only restriction: ‘is it possible?’” She described the transformation of the University Theater stage, creating an apron out to the audience, “inspired by the vocabulary of concert performers — like Lady Gaga — breaking through the proscenium.” The show’s design, Grigo said, is a combination of “spectacle and tricks.”
For Ellis, the “fluid design process” has aided the way that the characters’ “performativity can come across in many different moments.” That includes a band onstage making use of “curious instruments” and a “sense of improvisation” among the actors to create what Ellis called “an aesthetic of burlesque” and a “surreal magic circus.”
Characterizing much of Waits’s work as “a collage of freakshow, opera, and concert,” Ellis called Alice “an experiment” that brings in elements of childhood trauma, gauging “the emotional life of someone like Alice.” The dark side of Dodgson’s interest in young girls opens to “conversations about pedophilia, addiction, coping mechanisms,” and the kinds of denials and displacements that psychoanalysis might find in Alice’s Dreamland.
“Typically,” Ellis said, “clarity is the goal” of choices made in directing a play, “but here emotional clarity” is more important. He quoted a line from a letter Dodgson wrote — “our words mean more than we mean to say” — as a way of indicating how things in the show — the songs, the costumes, the props, the staging — can take on different meanings as within a dream.
“Inside, at the heart,” of the show, for Ellis, is “awareness of pain” and the “amount of effort it takes to alleviate” harm done to others.
A poem included in Carroll’s Through the Looking-Glass — the sequel to Alice in Wonderland — concludes with the line “Life, was it but a dream?” The poem is an acrostic in which the first letter of each line spells out “Alice Pleasance Liddell,” Alice’s full name. The poem, while describing Dodgson’s audience of children as they “lovingly nestle near” with “eager eye and willing ear,” mourns the “Wonderland in which they lie. / Dreaming as the days go by, / Dreaming as the summers die.” There is a sense in which, Alice’s emphasis on the pain caused to children notwithstanding, the trauma that motivated Carroll’s melancholy was the trauma of the death of childhood, and the dream that it might be sustained in art.
In any case, audiences should visit the Yale School of Drama production — the third and last show of the 2019 – 20 season — with “eager eye and willing ear.”
Alice plays at University Theater, 222 York St., from Feb. 1 to Feb. 7. Visit Yale School of Drama’s website for tickets and more information.
